A Summer in a Day

With a title borrowed from the Ray Bradbury short story of the same name, "All Summer in a Day" explores the broad tradition of imagery about the landscape using objects culled from the Tufts University Permanent Collection. The 1954 sci-fi short story describes a perhaps not-so-distant momentous celestial occasion. A colony of people living on Venus sees the Sun once every seven years and for only a few hours, at that. One child, Margot, writes the insightful lines: "I think the sun is a flower / That blooms for just one hour."

Whether through verbal or visual impressions, artists across time and working in all media distill the landscape into enduring creative utterances. The Tufts University Permanent Collection holds examples of historical and contemporary visions of such utterances, reflecting the evolution of a genre which takes acute notice of an equally unstable subject. In this era of increasingly vital conversations around land use and environmental health, the artistic endeavor of representing the landscape seems a more essential task than ever. Like Margot's poetic interpretation of the Sun in "All Summer in a Day," the works in this exhibition help us to remember an ephemeral subject already disappearing from view.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.