Evolving Visions of Land and Landscape

This exhibition is p​resented as part of Celebration! A History of the Visual Arts in Boulder. HOVAB is revisiting and celebrating the city’s lively visual art past, beginning in the late 19th century and continuing all the way to the present. Exhibitions of selected artwork will take place in 18 galleries city-wide and in Longmont (where many former Boulder artists now reside).

Artists have always been seduced by landscape. Across the world, we witness its influence since early mark making. With Boulder attracting so many who identify with the outdoors, it’s not surprising that many artists working here also turn their focus to the land. Evolving Visions of Land and Landscape explores works by twenty-six artists who live or have lived in Boulder from the mid-1800s to the present. Through literal, realistic, abstract, and metaphorical interpretations, they offer different ways of seeing and experiencing the land in media as diverse as their messages. While many set their sights on local environs, some look beyond to other parts of the state or other regions of the globe, and a few to landscapes of the imagination.

Time, place, and culture inspire artistic creation, and for artists who have lived in Boulder, the American West has offered rich source material. The evolving visions in this exhibition range from observational recording to romantic idealization of new frontiers, awe at the magnificence of nature, and concerns for the threat imposed on the landscape in the face of human habitation, industrialization, and dwindling natural resources. Acting as arbiters of taste and architects of change, these artists show us diverse ecological and sociological terrain, considering borders isolated and eradicated, personal and conceptual. In this exhibition we see the landscape as it was, as it is, and as it could be, reverent and cautionary for what it will become if we do not take these visions to heart.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website