AFA Summer 2021

Summer 80 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com A merican artists have captured the beauty, violence, poetry, and transformative power of the sea for more than 250 years. Their paintings shape our perceptions of the sea and engage our emotions, whether depicting the open ocean or waves crashing on shore, a ship in the midst of battle, or a yacht in racing splendor. In American Waters, co-organized by the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, features a diverse range of modern and historical artists. The exhibition embraces a superlative group of traditional marine works by painters like Fitz Henry Lane and James Edward Buttersworth at its core, but quickly turns to embrace an expansive notion of what constitutes a marine subject in American art. Works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Amy Sherald, Kay WalkingStick, Norman Rockwell, Hale Woodruff, Paul Cadmus, Thomas Hart Benton, Jacob Lawrence, Valerie Hegarty, Stuart Davis, and many others, each explore a facet of personal experience and perspective on America’s relationship with the sea. The works gathered for the exhibition, from America’s early days to the contemporary era, convey powerful origin stories and everyday scenes. They emphasize our individual and collective experience and deepen our understanding of the sea as a symbol of national opportunity and invention. In American Waters reveals that marine painting is so much more than ship portraits. Through more than ninety works, the exhibition traces changing attitudes about the symbolic and emotional resonance of the sea in America and how contemporary perspectives are informed by marine traditions. Visitors will discover the sea as a thematically rich way to reflect on American culture and environment, learn how coastal and maritime symbols moved inland across the United States, and contemplate what it means to be “in American waters.” Collaborative and interdisciplinary, In American Waters combines art history, maritime history, and even nneuroscience to create a more expansive and inclusive vision of the role of the marine in American painting, one that encompasses greater geographic breadth and a multiplicity of artists and artistic expression. To these ends, this exhibition is the first to grapple with how attitudes about the sea may manifest in works that are not traditional seascapes. IN AMERICAN WATERS by Austen Barron Bailly, Sarah Chasse, Daniel Finamore, and George Schwartz CONTINUED ON PAGE 89