Resource & Ruin: Wisconsin's Enduring Landscape

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courtesy Chazen Museum of Art

A painting of people clearing lumber froma frozen lake.

William H. Boose, "Clearing Petenwell Lake," 1950.

Landscapes are probably the biggest crowd-pleasers in the art world, but they also convey important evolving attitudes toward the land. “Resource & Ruin: Wisconsin’s Enduring Landscape” highlights 40 paintings, sculpture, ceramics and more spanning the 18th century to the present that depict the varied flora and geography of the state with an eye to their fragility in the current environment of climate change and development. Works by John Steuart Curry, Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright will be on display. The Chazen is closed for annual maintenance from Dec. 24-Jan. 13 (note shorter time than originally announced).

media release: Americans have long engaged with the United States’ iconic landscapes, identifying with them, turning to them for inspiration and mining them for natural resources. The Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison showcases this relationship and its effects in Resource & Ruin: Wisconsin’s Enduring Landscape, on view Dec. 19, 2022–March 26, 2023. The exhibition will feature approximately 40 works, including paintings, sculpture, ceramics and more, that date from the 18th century to the present. While many of the objects on view will be from the Chazen’s permanent collection, visitors will also see several important loans, including four works from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

event: Re-Storying the Landscape: A Conversation about Ecological Transformation through the Arts

Wednesday, Feb. 22, 5–6:30 p.m., Chazen Auditorium

Join the Chazen Museum of Art and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies for Re-Storying the Landscape: A Conversation about Ecological Transformation through the Arts. We will take a look at how story can change our sense of presence in the land, and the way that performances can shape narratives.

Presenters include:

    Michael Bell, musician, composer, and Philip David Lowe Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at UW–Madison

    Robert Cleary and Lisa Thurrell, artistic directors of Kanopy Dance Company

    Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas, cofounders and directors of Wormfarm Institute

 “For centuries, American artists have engaged with nature and captured it in their work. However, the need for resources and the desire to control the environment have put many beloved landscapes at risk. Resource & Ruin uses the prairies, forests and waterways of Wisconsin to tell a national story of a revered environment in crisis,” said Janine Yorimoto Boldt, associate curator of American art at the Chazen.

 Several works on view will offer insight into how Americans have engaged with and manipulated the environment. Others will address climate change and other environmental consequences of development and highlight the results of extraction, exploitation and conservation. The exhibition will include works by Indigenous artists and confront slavery’s relationship to resource extraction.

Among the works on view will be William H. Boose’s Clearing Pentenwell Lake (1950), a painting that represents human power over nature. The oil-on-canvas work depicts the logging of a man-made lake created in 1948 when the Wisconsin River Power Company constructed a dam across the Wisconsin River for hydroelectric power and flood control. Small figures in the foreground burn wood, chop down trees and load trucks while a line of fallen trees, the dam and a tall rock structure command the background. Boose was a farmer and a regular participant in the Wisconsin Rural Arts Program (WRAP), which originated in 1954 as an outreach initiative of UW–Madison. It is now administered by the Association of Wisconsin Artists.

Resource & Ruin also includes Erosion and Contour Cropping (ca. 1938-40), a painting by WRAP’s co-founder John Steuart Curry. He often used art to address technological innovation in agricultural communities, including conservation and research efforts by the UW College of Agriculture.

Works on loan from the Wisconsin Historical Society include a portrait of Morgan L. Martin and Pecatonica Battleground (1857), both by Milwaukee duo Samuel M. Brookes and Thomas H. Stevenson. Pecatonica Battleground is one of three landscape paintings of Black Hawk War battlefield scenes commissioned by the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Resource & Ruin also includes a rare Weed Vase by Frank Lloyd Wright; and works by Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keefe, Thomas Moran, Lela Naranjo Gutierrez and Luther Gutierrez and others.

For programming and event information, check chazen.wisc.edu/events/.

About the Chazen Museum of Art

The Chazen Museum of Art makes its home between two lakes on the beautiful campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Within walking distance of the state capitol, it sits squarely in the heart of a vibrant college town. The Chazen’s expansive two-building site holds the second-largest collection of art in Wisconsin, and at 166,000 square feet, is the largest collecting museum in the Big 10. The collection of approximately 24,000 works of art covers diverse historical periods, cultures and geographic locations, from ancient Greece, Western Europe and the Soviet Empire to Moghul India, 18th-century Japan and modern Africa.