This series is presented through a partnership of the
Arts Council of Moore County and Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities
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Modern American Landscape Painters: Turning Nature into Art  Modern art arrived in America in the early 20th century at a small New York City gallery. There photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz introduced the works of European avant-garde artists, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, to a circle of adventurous young Americans, who found in the French masters an inspiration for their own innovative styles of painting. This younger generation, including John Marin (Photo right of his New York Series), Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe and the photographer Paul Strand, adopted the techniques of abstraction to their native subject matter. In their determination to invent an art that was both modern and American, they focused on Manhattan city dwellers and skyscrapers, as well as their native landscape. Their intent was to communicate not only the grandeur of soaring urban monuments, but also the spiritual traditions of their homeland.
This lecture series will trace the development of uniquely American forms of modern landscape art as painters and sculptors scattered to distant parts of the country and invented new techniques to express their responses to new environments. Some artists of the Stieglitz circle have become identified in our minds with specific regions, for example, Marin with the rocky Maine coast and O'Keeffe with the spare horizons of New Mexico. As these artists became rooted in their surroundings, they refined their visual language, based on rhythmic lines, powerful shapes and vivid colors, to express the mystery and sublimity of nature. In the next generation, Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock extended the possibilities of an anti-naturalistic style of painting when he dispensed entirely with recognizable images. His monumental abstract drip paintings of the late 1940s communicate the artist's personal experience of nature through skeins of paint and whorls of color. Late 20th century sculptors like Robert Smithson, Christo and Andy Goldsworthy introduced a new form of landscape art when they traveled to important sites to construct massive earthworks or to modify pristine nature with the addition of man-made materials. Though the sculptors worked on a monumental scale, their constructed interventions or modifications to the landscape accomplished the same purpose as earlier paintings by Stieglitz circle artists: they forced the viewer to see nature anew, often by suggesting unseen processes and contingencies.
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Lecture #1 - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 10 a.m. by Dr. Molly Gwinn
Learning from the French Avant-Garde: John Marin & Paul Strand
 The artists and photographers who gathered in Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue took what they needed from the exhibited drawings of Cezanne and Picasso: a pictorial language that would express the modernity of New York. Marin wanted to show "what a great city was doing," and his images of Wall Street skyscrapers and the Brooklyn Bridge seem to dance to the rhythm of his modified cubist style. Photographer Strand (photo left of "Town Hall 1946") reduced his views of elevated tracks and city backyards to geometric patterns that resembled the elegant abstractions of European artists. In the 1920s, both artists shifted their focus to rural communities and captured the rugged Yankee spirit in landscapes and portraits.
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Lecture #2 - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 10 a.m. by Dr. Molly Gwinn
Escape to the Southwest: Georgia O'Keeffe
 O'Keeffe discovered the true subjects of her art after she settled in New Mexico in the 1930s. The images that she painted there, including monumental flowers (including "Belladonna" pictured left), bleached bones and limitless skies, express her deep connection to the untouched landscapes and indigenous Native American culture of the region. Like a number of her colleagues in the Stieglitz circle who also traveled west, she found in the native communities compelling evidence that New Mexico was the most American place of the modern era and home to our enduring social values of equality and diversity.
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Lecture #3 - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 10 a.m. by Dr. Molly Gwinn
Artist as Force of Nature: Jackson Pollock
 Pollock (photo left) once said, "I am nature," as if to excuse the absence of recognizable subject matter in his vast compositions. In truth, his response to natural phenomena, and not the appearance of specific objects, drove his creative process of pouring, dripping or splattering paint across a canvas spread on the studio floor. Pollock's inventive technique established a new set of priorities for artists; art was about the process of self-realization and it depended on improvisation and accident, not ideas and certainty. However, Pollock's roots ran deep; he admired predecessors like Marin, whose energy enlivens his pictorial structures, and the ideas of Walt Whitman, whose rhetoric of absolute equality is played out in the all-over movement of the drip paintings.
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Lecture #4 - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 10 a.m. by Denise Drum Baker
Environmental Earthworks: Robert Smithson, Christo & Andy Goldsworthy
 Earthworks was a movement that emerged in America during the 1960s, when a number of artists determined to heighten public awareness of man's relationship with the natural world by intervening in the landscape with a series of thought provoking constructions. Environmental sculpture included a range of projects, from monuments like the massive and enduring "Spiral Jetty" (photo left) built by Smithson in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, to experiences that engaged a community over a finite period of time like Christo's "Running Fence" on the northern California coast. Although the precise meaning of each construction varied, the underlying aim was always to create artistic imagery using earth, rocks, soil and other natural material and thus to increase our sensibility towards the environment.
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ABOUT THE LECTURERS:
Dr. Molly Gwinn is an art historian who has presented the spring lecture series in the past and has offered courses at the Center for Creative Retirement at Sandhills Community College. She earned her doctorate from Rutgers University and has taught art history at Rutgers, the School of Continuing and Professional Studies at New York University and the Dallas Museum of Art. She is the daughter of the late Barbara Sutherland, a well-known Southern Pines artist and a long-time resident of Penick Village.
Denise Drum Baker is an artist and professor of visual arts at Sandhills Community College. She earned her Master's from Appalachian State University. Her list of awards and honors include Faculty Exchange from The Newry Institute in Northern Ireland; Fulbright Teacher Exchange Scholarship Nominee; and a Distance Learning Instructor for the NC Museum of Art. She most recently completed work on Crossing the Atlantic, an exchange project with her Ireland colleagues demonstrating the lost art of letter-writing.
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COST (per lecture): $10 for ACMC & Weymouth Members / $15 for Nonmembers
All Lectures will be presented at 10:00 a.m.
at Weymouth Center (555 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines).
Space is limited. Register with full payment at the Arts Council Moore County's offices
at Campbell House (482 E. Connecticut Ave., Southern Pines) or by calling 910-692-4356.
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