The Hudson’s Past and Present Are on View at the Wallach Gallery
The exhibition, Shifting Shorelines, illustrates how human activity and industry have had an impact on the river.
Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology Along the Hudson River is on display at the Wallach Gallery through January 12, 2025. The exhibition presents historic and contemporary art, visual culture, and environmental science to engage the history of human existence, commerce, and industry along the Hudson estuary. Focusing on the river’s edges from Albany southward to its flow into the Atlantic Ocean, the show foregrounds the impact of local industry on the natural environment, highlighting the record of the river's distinctive ecological features such as brackish and salt marshes, mudflats, and beaches, along with the docks, factories, and buildings that crowded them out. Shifting Shorelines demonstrates the various cycles of exploitation, damage, and reclamation.
Through more than 100 works—paintings, prints, sculpture, film, photography, material culture, and scientific documentation—Shifting Shorelines traces how, from the pre-contact era to the present, human activity and industry have affected the river and its shores. By challenging mythologies promoted in the 19th century that the Hudson was a virgin wilderness, the exhibition offers a richer, more complex understanding of the legacy, life, and livelihoods along the river, informed by the voices and experiences of a broad range of creators. Several contemporary artists bring new environmental perspectives and responses to the deterioration and reclamation of the shoreline.
The curatorial team consists of Annette Blaugrund, an independent art historian; Wallach Gallery Director and Chief Curator Betti-Sue Hertz; Elizabeth Hutchinson,Tow Associate Professor of Art History at Barnard College; and Dorothy Peteet, a NASA researcher, Columbia adjunct professor, and paleoecologist, who was recently profiled in The New York Times.
Hutchinson and Peteet discuss the exhibition and the Hudson’s future with Columbia News.
What was the impetus behind this exhibition?
Elizabeth Hutchinson: The exhibition was originally developed by Annette and Betti-Sue before I was brought on board. I believe I was identified as a good candidate for the team because I have taught interdisciplinary classes on the Hudson at Barnard, and was a participant in the Teagle Foundation-funded River Summer program long ago (as was Dorothy). I also was an instructor in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for K-12 teachers focused on the Hudson at Ramapo State College for three sessions, 2011-2015.
Dorothy Peteet: As Elizabeth notes, Annette and Betti-Sue conceived the exhibition in recognition that much had been left out regarding the history of the Hudson River and its shorelines. Annette reached out to me, as she knew I had been working on the paleoecological history of the region using scientific methods.
What are some examples of works in the exhibit that show the Hudson as a natural paradise, as well as representations of the river illustrating its exploitation and environmental damage?
Hutchinson: I'm very excited that we have been able to borrow artwork produced by both historic and contemporary members of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, which show the tribe’s ongoing reciprocal relationship with the river and its shores. The basket from the early 19th century is a testament to the black ash trees that once thrived in the wetlands along the river, which have since been polluted and destroyed.
Another work in the show that will surprise visitors is an 18th-century view of Philipse Manor at the mouth of the Saw Mill River in Yonkers. The image depicts mills that were used to process harvested wood and grains grown on Westchester farms by the Philipse family's tenants. The Philipse family was deeply involved in the slave trade, and the products that passed through the mills (themselves operated by enslaved workers) were shipped to plantations in the Caribbean. In this way, the resource extraction along the Hudson enabled West Indian plantations to focus on brutal, but profitable sugar production.
The basket and the print are somewhat modest in appearance, but more impressively scaled landscape paintings also have a lot to teach us about the histories of exploitation and environmental damage along the Hudson. As the exhibition makes clear, this is often accomplished in ways that downplay the negative aspects of industrialization. Nineteenth-century painter Johann Carmiencke's 1856 view of the Iron Works in Poughkeepsie, for example, accurately captures one of the many factories along the river's shores that processed local iron, and loaded it on ships to send down river. But the painting's pastoral tone, including snowy puffs of smoke from the factory in the foreground, do little to convey the pollution, noise, and crowds that characterized Poughkeepsie at the time. Paintings like this one document the ease with which ongoing environmental damage was ignored.
Peteet: One of the most revealing artworks to me is the engraving of New Amsterdam harbor in a 1651 book. The image reveals the type of Lenape shallow draft canoe with long handles so beautifully adapted to the Jamaica Bay marshes, allowing one to easily alight from the boat in the wetlands. Yet the harbor is also full of European watercraft and fortifications, in stark contrast to the natural environment. Victor Gifford Audubon’s view of the Hudson depicts the shoreline forests and abundant fish catch on a serene beach, as opposed to George Benjamin Luks’s Roundhouse at High Bridge, which exposes the terrible air pollution that the railroads brought to the Hudson Valley.
Natural riverine items such as net sinkers and sturgeon scutes found alongside the river attest to the sustenance that the Hudson supplied to Native people, while Anthony Papa’s White Butterflies, Blue Hudson illustrates the severe restrictions and hardware now found along the river’s shoreline. There’s also Every Ocean Hughes’s photograph from The Piers Untitled series, which highlights the treated wood that remains in the Hudson and pollutes its waters. One of the strongest images to document ongoing damage to the shoreline is An-My Lê’s Hudson River, from Trap Rock, an image from another photographic series, of a basalt quarry along the Hudson. Marie Lorenz captures both hardened exploitative shore history, as well as the river’s abundant marine traffic in her video, Tide and Current Taxi.
How is the reclamation of the Hudson's shorelines presented?
Hutchinson: Others have more to say on this subject than I do. But I will mention that many late-19th-century and early-20th-century works record the parks that were created along the river, which have played a role in this history. The Palisades Interstate Park in New Jersey, as one example, demonstrates how owners of Hudson River mansions concerned about their views helped spur the river’s environmental movement.
Peteet: Reclamation is ongoing, but has a long way to go. The shore continues to be hardened, but cleaner water and more public access demonstrate progress. High nitrogen, PCBs, pharmaceuticals, and plastic pollution remain large challenges. Wetlands along the river are still disappearing, covered by Amazon warehouses and golf courses. Sea level rise is a continuing issue for preserving these wetlands, as well as the habitat, coastal protection, and carbon stocks that they give us. We present the trajectory of change in the exhibition up to today, to better understand how best to improve and preserve the Hudson habitat for the future.
How did you create a dialogue between the art and science angles of the show?
Hutchinson: Our research included consultations with a range of experts in archaeology, history, and science. Dorothy took the lead in helping us navigate the latter angle, connecting us with important sources and advisers. I also drew on my own knowledge and experiences from past teaching.
Peteet: As Elizabeth notes, we spoke with a range of specialists, who have documented the art, history, and environmental science of the Hudson Valley and the river itself.
Are you optimistic about the Hudson's future in terms of climate change and other issues?
Hutchinson: The organizations whose work we highlight at the end of the exhibition are doing impactful work, and we have already seen great improvement in the health of the Hudson, though it continues to be America's largest Superfund site. The work of contemporary artists such as Marie Lorenz and Courtney Leonard, both included in the show, are bringing the attention of new audiences to these issues. A better future won't happen on its own, but I'm optimistic that it is within reach.
Peteet: Yes! Many, many people and groups care about the Hudson River and its habitat. These include, to mention a few: Riverkeeper, which literally watches the Hudson daily; NYC Bird Alliance (formerly New York City Audubon), tracking the declining Black-crowned Night Heron populations; Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay, where researchers and volunteers plant oysters, and scientists measure bacteria in the tributaries. State and local organizations are concerned about the river and its future, and are trying to both learn more and protect its waters and shorelines. Younger people understand that this precious resource needs more protection and preservation, and living artists are bringing this message to the fore in so many inspirational ways.
Shifting Shorelines' exhibition catalogue brings together discussions of historical and contemporary art, material culture, and environmental science to engage in an interdisciplinary critical dialogue. The essays elucidate the various cycles of exploitation, damage, and reclamation of the Hudson River's edges. In so doing, the publication offers a counter reading of received art historical narratives about the “scenic Hudson.”
This richly illustrated collection of writing tells a story of human and non-human history, which reverberated across the country on other industrialized rivers such as the Mississippi, Ohio, and Columbia. There are essays by exhibition curators Annette Blaugrund, Betti-Sue Hertz, Elizabeth Hutchinson, and Dorothy Peteet, along with essays by other contributors, a transcript of a roundtable with artists whose work is included in the show, 76 illustrations, and a comprehensive list of works in the exhibition.
A curator’s roundtable will take place on Sunday, October 13, at 1 pm at the Lenfest Center for the Arts. For additional exhibition-related programming, visit the Wallach Gallery website.