From the Smithsonian American Art Museum: The Lay of the Land

Installed in the American and regional, and modern and contemporary galleries, spectacular works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Thomas Moran, and Alma Thomas from Smithsonian American Art Museum accentuate the Museum’s own treasures and enhance the stories being told. They add new and diverse artistic voices to fully explore pictorial approaches to landscape painting from nineteenth-century idealized naturalism to contemporary abstraction.

Thomas Moran’s Mist in Kanab Canyon, Utah (1892), situated within the UMFA’s award-winning permanent collection exhibition "American and Regional Art: Mythmaking & Truth-Telling," enables deeper exploration of how nineteenth-century artists represented the Utah landscape and how their images shaped popular perceptions of the American West.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s "Manhattan" (1932) features prominently in the American and regional art gallery focused on modernism. O’Keeffe’s painting prompts consideration of the relationship between urban development and concurrent experiments with abstraction in the first half of the twentieth century.

Additional works by Ilya Bolotowsky, Theodore Roszak, and John Storrs were borrowed from a private collection to augment this presentation.