ART 387 - City and Country: New York and the Hudson Valley

Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)

The year 2025 marks the 200 th anniversary of Thomas Cole’s first trip up the Hudson River, the mythic “origin story” of the so-called Hudson River School of painters. New York-based artists like Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Frederic Church glorified the Hudson Valley as a place of sublime wilderness, both proximate to New York and its opposite: an idyllic site of preindustrial labor and pristine landscapes. This course draws on the Loeb Art Center’s collection of Hudson River School paintings as well as a concurrent exhibition which considers how the Hudson Valley’s economy has long depended on urban tourists and deployed eye-catching printed matter—maps, posters, postcards, advertisements, guidebooks, etc.—to beguile potential visitors. The course explores how arcadian myths cloak the innumerable ways city and country are bound up in a complex network of economic, cultural, infrastructural, and ecological exchanges, including forced displacement and the enslavement and exploitation of laborers. Topics include tourism, labor, industry, infrastructure, art colonies, and the counterculture. While the Hudson Valley is the main case study, we draw on a larger body of literature and visual culture that sets the countryside in opposition to the city. John Murphy.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

Second six-week course.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS