John Steuart Curry’s “Our Good Earth” and Roger Brown’s “Sudden Avalanche.”
Sometimes poignant, often powerful, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Our Good Earth” captures the tragic impact of humanity upon its home.
“This show is one of the first exhibitions I’ve done in some time that has a political edge to it,” says Richard Axsom, MMoCa’s senior curator. “It takes on climate change and global warming, endangered habitats and species migration and more.”
Selected from the museum’s permanent collection, the works in the exhibit, which runs through Aug. 21, address how modern and contemporary artists have portrayed the natural world. It documents a range of locales, geological features and weather, in diverse media and styles.
The title comes from a 1942 lithograph by John Steuart Curry, one of the great regionalists and the first artist in residence at any university anywhere. (He served at UW-Madison from 1936 until his death in 1946.) The exhibit alternates between pleasant and provocative; its title could as easily have come from Curry’s “The Line Storm,” with its horizon trajectory filled with fiery light and raw power.
The exhibit includes two accounts of the planet’s beginnings: the Mayan creation myth as rendered by Carlos Mérida in a selection of lithographs from “Estampas del Popol,” and “The First Four Days of Creation,” a series of engravings by Fritz Eichenberg.
Following the expulsion from Eden, viewers are swept along through lyrical works such as Jack Beal’s glowing, impressionist “Taylor’s Way” and Thomas Hart Benton’s poetic “Sunset.” Grant Wood’s signature gumdrop trees pepper his “July Fifteenth.” Contrasted against these are bold images such as Claes Oldenburg’s whimsical “Floating Three Way Plug.”
The conceptual exhibit climaxes as witness to violence. Curry returns with “Flood,” tragic and obscenely beautiful at the same time. Fire, drought and Armageddon are engendered in various scenes. The blunt and richly ironic “Welcome to Siberia, The Nuclear Freeze, The Flat Earth Society [...],” sadly prescient when painted by Roger Brown in 1983, anchors the exhibit in vigil.
Perhaps offering a counterpoint to the apocalyptic finish, “Our Good Earth” includes a learning station for children.
