On our program tonight, we look at Hudson River school at the New York historic society.

It features landscape paintings by the charity artist kay walkingstick.

Featuring more than 40 works including paintings as well as objects such as woven baskets and ceramic jars, the exhibition explores the relationship between indigenous art and the standard history of Art in America.

Curator Wendi will be our guide.

The exhibition is On View through April 14, 2024.

>> Kay WalkingStick Hudson River school brings together two discrete sets of landscape paintings.

One by the contemporary Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick and the other by a group of 19th century artists, primarily European-American men known as the Hudson River school.

The question that the exhibition poses is what is the relationship between these two bodies of work?

Do they support one another?

Do they conflict with one another?

do they tell the same story, different stories?

And what story do they tell together about North American land and about landscape practice?

Kay WalkingStick is a force in contemporary American art and one of the most renowned artists of her generation.

She is 88 years old and still building a remarkable career that at this point spans six decades.

The Hudson River school is generally credited with forging the American landscape tradition.

As kay said to me when we first met, how can you be a landscape painter in the United States and not think about the Hudson River school?

The answer is you cannot because their legacy looms so large.

But that does not mean that the Hudson River school paintings are not problematic.

Her work helps us to see some of those problems including its representation or lack of representation of the native communities already in this land.

inKay's -- in kay's current landscape practice, she lays vistas with patterns and she draws these patterns from native objects.

We are looking at a painting landscape that is a window onto an illusionist take world -- illusionistic world and these sit on the window glass so they pop off just a little bit off of the representational landscape and they act as a kind of barrier or speed bump so they stop your eye just a little bit from going straight into the land and this is one way that Kay re-characterizes North American landscapes that have been upheld by Hudson River school artists as ripe for settlement, as part of the story of American colonizers.

She reclaims this land as indigenous homeland.

We open the exhibition with her reinterpretations of a painting by Thomas and a painting by Durant.

The Thomas Cole painting that Kay decided to tackle is one of the most iconic paintings in American art history.

Every student of American Art history knows this painting.

It is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of art.

The title of her painting is "Tom, where are thee -- ?"

She is speaking directly to him and asking, how can you paint this land?

How can you paint the Connecticut River Valley and not acknowledge, not honor the native people who live there?

One of my favorite works in the exhibition's Niagara.

This was painted by Kay in 2022.

We had invited her to view our Hudson River school paintings at our storage facility in Jersey City and she was immediately drawn to two paintings in particular, both of Niagara Falls but in very different formats.

One by a woman named Louisa and another by John Trimble, just long and panoramic and all-encompassing.

It is a gorgeous landscape.

Kay positions the viewer at the brink of the falls.

She spills the water across two square panels.

We see this line where the water bends over the cliff that Kay describes as luminescent like blown glass, and we see the water falling in what she describes as clumps of cotton wool.

It is beautiful.

You can feel immersed in it.

It is 80 inches wide and you can almost feel the famous spray of Niagara prickling your skin but it's also so much more than a rapturous landscape because of that pattern that she overlays on top of it so she has taken Niagara Falls, which for decades has been upheld by so many European-American artists as a monument to American grandeur and power, and she has recharacterized it as indigenous homeland.

American art is a plurality, and I think that by attending to that plurality of voices, by looking at the conflicts, by looking at the connections, between different groups and across time, we can push this field productively forward.

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