From Here to the Horizon: American Landscape Prints from Whistler to Clemins

This American print survey presents more than a century of panoramic vistas featuring the horizon: the great demarcation between earth and sky, world and universe. Sweeping landscape views have inspired a wonder for nature and the immensity of world, as well as, perhaps, a wish to reach new levels (or horizons) of attainment. This exhibition explores how different graphic artists have represented the topography of places nearby and faraway, real or imagined, whether dramatic wilderness, coastal scenes, rural settings, or places on the periphery of inhabited communities. J.A.M. Whistler and Vija Celmins each depict a body of water in an evocative way, yet each artist’s approach is different. For his etching of the Venice lagoon, Whistler made a few wispy lines to suggest expanses of water and sky. Celmins’s lithograph of a section of the ocean’s surface is almost photorealistic in detail, prompting simultaneous contemplation of the specific and the timeless, the finite and the infinite. This exhibition also includes early twentieth-century prints by John Taylor Arms, Gustave Baumann, Kerr Eby, Frances Gearhart, Childe Hassam, Blanche Lazzell, Grant Wood, and many others. Among the contemporary artists represented are John Beerman, April Gornik, Michael Mazur, and Susan Shatter, as well as other examples from the Zimmerli’s Rutgers Archives for Printmaking Studios.