Great scapes

If you’re looking for a great place to take the whole family during the holiday season, head on over to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.

In addition to the fascinating, inventive exhibitions spotlighting artworks by Northwest sculptor Scott Fife and print maker Joe Feddersen, a captivating collection of Western American art dominates the main gallery space.

“Drawn to Yellowstone: Artists in America’s First National Park” runs through Feb. 19 at the museum, 2316 W. First Ave., in Spokane’s historic Browne’s Addition neighborhood.

This is the third stop for this visually rich traveling exhibition organized by the Autry National Center’s Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.

It features more than 70 paintings, prints and drawings based on the accompanying publication of the same name written by scholar Peter Hassrick, director for the Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum.

“The goal of the exhibit is to show the power of art to shape the way we view nature and use Western lands, particularly America’s first national park,” says organizing curator Amy Scott from her office at the Autry National Center.

The Yellowstone territory was originally home to nomadic Crow Indians and Shoshone Indians, descendants of the first peoples of the Rocky Mountain region, according to exhibition materials.

Since the government and commercial expeditions in the mid-1800s, early territorial troops and ultimately millions of tourists from around the world have been drawn to this magnificent region of the American West.

“Seemingly a place apart from civilization, Yellowstone’s exotic appeal has lured generations of artists,” Scott says.

“In many ways the visitor really learns about the evolution of American art from the late 19th century to the present,” says Jochen Wierich, former art curator at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, now with the Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville, Tenn.

“This wonderful exhibition is chronological from the early rudimentary drawings of Yellowstone to very contemporary, almost abstract paintings,” he says.

It was the grand landscape painters of the late 1800s – Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Hill – that really put Yellowstone on the map.

In 1871, Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson were part of Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden’s historic survey of the region. The following year, along with Hayden’s testimony, it was Moran’s watercolors and Jackson’s photographs that helped persuade Congress to pass the Yellowstone Park bill.

Two remarkable paintings from those early years are Moran’s “Golden Gateway to the Yellowstone” and Hill’s “Great Falls of Yellowstone.”

“Golden Gateway” was painted in 1894, about the time of Moran’s second visit to Yellowstone. In the intervening years since his first trip, Moran’s reputation had grown to national status as America’s premier painter of Western lands.

“What’s interesting about ‘Golden Gateway’ is that it is a composite painting,” says curator Scott. “You can’t actually stand anywhere in Yellowstone and see that exact view. It shows Moran’s use of artistic license at that time.”

In the two decades between Moran’s first and second visit, Yellowstone had opened up tremendously as a tourist destination, due in part to the fact that he had helped make it so famous.

Moran’s first visit in 1871 was funded by the Northern Pacific Railroad, says Scott. He was commissioned to create spectacular views of the West that the railroad could use in promotional material.

“Moran’s presence was actually part of a commercial endeavor,” says Scott. “There has always been this close relationship between art and commerce in Yellowstone; it was there from the very beginning.”

In contrast to Moran’s composite composition in “Golden Gateway,” Hill’s 1884 oil painting, “Great Falls of Yellowstone,” is “a pure landscape painting on its own terms,” says Scott.

“If you’ve been to Yellowstone, it actually looks like it. It is Yellowstone on its own terms.”

Concludes Wierich: “What this exhibition drives home is the fact that Yellowstone truly is ‘the Nation’s Art Gallery.’ This natural wonder represents something about America that is worth preserving, celebrating and appreciating.”