In 1932, Maine-born artist Marsden Hartley presented Pictures of New England by a New Englander at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery in New York City. For Hartley, the exhibition was a chance to reestablish himself as a “painter of Maine” after years of living and working in New York and abroad with little success. By the 1930s and until his death, he lived part of the year in Maine and dedicated his time to regional and nationalistic subject matter. This shift was due in part to a broader embrace of nativism in American Art and a growing popularity in “soil-and-spirit” American subjects.

Marsden Hartley: A Sense of Place focuses on Hartley’s paintings of New England and other American subjects along with earlier examples of his work abroad. The exhibition shows how Hartley’s shift later in life was deliberate and created new opportunities for the artist in the marketplace. It also touches upon the broader cultural shift away from European modernism and towards nativism that took place after World War I.

This is the first time Sheldon is showcasing and critically engaging with its collection of works by Hartley. For the exhibition, the Wabanaki (Penobscot & Passamaquoddy) artist Maya Tihtiyas Attean (b.1994) provides a contemporary response to Hartley paintings. Living in Abenaki territory in Maine, Attean’s work engages with the region’s natural environment in relation to her family’s history and Indigenous ancestry. With Hartley and Attean, this exhibition offers two different relationships with the New England landscape nearly one hundred years apart.

^{Marsden Hartley: A Sense of Place is organized by Christian Wurst, associate curator for exhibition, Sheldon Museum of Art.}