Sheldon Museum of Art Main Content

News

The Home Ground Collection: Photographs in Honor of Writer Barry Lopez

Photograph by Laura McPhee: “Irrigator’s Tarp Directing Water, Fourth of July Creek Ranch, Custer County, Idaho,” 2004, The Home Ground Collection: Gift of the artist in honor of Barry Lopez, Sheldon Museum of Art.

Laura McPhee, Irrigator's Tarp Directing Water, Fourth of July Creek Ranch, Custer County, Idaho (detail), 2004.


Sheldon Museum of Art will be the repository for the Home Ground Collection, a group of more than ninety works donated by fifty American photographers to honor the writer Barry Lopez, who died in 2020 at age seventy-five.

For more than five decades, Lopez wrote about the landscape in lyrical prose that offered a vivid and passionate account of humankind’s relationship with the natural world. Best known for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, which received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1986, Lopez was the author of dozens of essays and works of fiction and nonfiction, including the recently released Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World.

Toby Jurovics, director of the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment, praised the photographers who came together to honor Lopez’s life and influence: “When the Home Ground Collection was first proposed, the response was immediate and enthusiastic. Barry was a guidepost for so many writers and artists, and this collection is but one reflection of the affection and respect of his friends and colleagues.”

Barry Lopez, Eugene, Oregon, August 5, 2020, © Ron Jude.

Lopez’s careful and conscientious descriptions of place provided inspiration for many artists who found a sympathetic connection with his intimate understanding of the world around us. Virginia Beahan, one of the photographers who donated work to the Home Ground Collection, carried a copy of “Arctic Dreams” with her for years. Noting Lopez’s meticulous attention to detail, she said, “I felt like he was with me, using his version of a view camera — or I was with him — as he studied and thought about and tried to make sense the world.”

In addition to Beahan, the photographers listed below donated prints in honor of Lopez.

The collection marks the realization of Lopez’s long-held desire to create a photographic companion to Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape, a reader’s dictionary of regional landscape terms that he compiled with Debra Gwartney in 2006. In that volume, forty-five American writers — William deBuys, Robert Haas, Barbara Kingsolver, Kim Stafford, Arthur Sze, and Joy Williams among them — created more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters. They considered familiar and evocative terms such as “alluvial fan,” “basin and range,” “blue hole,” “floodplain,” and “mesa.”

In turn, the photographers in the Home Ground Collection sought resonances between these phrases and their own work. Prompted by terms such as “badlands,” “confluence,” “hanging valley,” “sawtooth,” and “swale” that evoke both specific locations and the distinctive character of American topography, their photographs trace the shape of the landscapes we call home and the ones that fill our imaginations. Together, these places form a history of who we are as a nation, our aspirations, and our desires.

Sheldon Museum of Art and the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment have organized an exhibition of the Home Ground Collection titled From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez. The exhibition, which will have its inaugural presentation at Sheldon from January 27 through June 30, 2023, is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue, with contributions from Debra Gwartney, Robert Macfarlane, and Toby Jurovics.

Photographers

Robert Adams
Virginia Beahan
Marion Belanger
Michael Berman
Andrew Borowiec
Barbara Bosworth
Joann Brennan
Lois Conner
Gregory Conniff
Linda Connor
Thomas Joshua Cooper
Robert Dawson
Peter de Lory
Lucinda Devlin
Rick Dingus
Terry Evans
Lukas Felzmann
Steve Fitch
Frank Gohlke
Peter Goin
Emmet Gowin
Wayne Gudmundson
Owen Gump
David T. Hanson
Alex Harris
Allen Hess
Ben Huff
Ron Jude
Robert Glenn Ketchum
Mark Klett
Stuart Klipper
Peter Latner
David Maisel
Laura McPhee
Andrew Moore
Eric Paddock
Mary Peck
Edward Ranney
Jeff Rich
Meghann Riepenhoff
Mark Ruwedel
Mike Smith
Joel Sternfeld
Martin Stupich
William Sutton
Bob Thall
Terry Toedtemeier
Geoff Winningham
Dennis Witmer
William Wylie
  More info

News

Inside Edward Hopper's Room in New York

"Room in New York" by Edward Hopper



Sheldon's spring newsletter invites you inside the most beloved painting in the museum’s collection, Edward Hopper's Room in New York. The work, which was first shown at the University of Nebraska in March 1936, was purchased with the prescient expectation that one day Hopper would be regarded as a leader among American artists.

A print version of this newsletter was sent to members of the Sheldon Art Association, the museum's dedicated support organization. For information on membership or to join, use this link.



Edward Hopper
Nyack, NY 1882–New York, NY 1967
Room in New York, 1932
Oil on canvas
29 × 36 5/8 inches
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, H–166.1936
  More info

News

The mystery of a missing painting

Detail of Walt Kuhn's painting "Apples in Wooden Boat."



During routine examination of Walt Kuhn's Apples in Wooden Boat at the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center in Omaha, an important discovery was made—the title of a missing work by Kuhn, Young Pines Among Rocks, had been penned on the back of the stretcher.

Lincoln's Bryan Medical Center became a collaborator in the search for the missing landscape, offering X-radiography which provided enough information on the comparative density of the pigments used by the artist to confirm the presence of a second composition.


Walt Kuhn
New York, NY 1877–White Plains, NY 1949
Apples in Wooden Boat
Oil on canvas, 1938
24 1/2 × 29 3/8 inches
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, H-203.1940
  More info

News

Sheldon News Fall 2020

We're offering our fall newsletter here for you to flip through as an Issuu magazine or for you to download as a pdf. As you'll see in its pages, this online resource is just one of the things we've created to present museum experiences that meet the extraordinary challenges of 2020.

The cover photo was taken by Kale Gardner, a junior majoring in secondary social science education.


News

Edward Hopper: Poetry & Abstraction in the Real


An essay by artist Cary Smith

Edward Hopper lived through one of the richest periods of evolution and transformation in the history of visual art. He was born in Nyack New York on July 22, 1882, when French impressionism was in full swing and lived until May 15, 1967, during the pop art movement.

Hopper showed a strong interest in drawing by the age of five and was provided instructional magazines and illustrated books while in grade school. Early on he learned the importance of the examination of light and shadow, something that stayed with him throughout his career. He inherited his mother’s artistic tendencies and his father’s intellectual curiosity. His parents were encouraging, well-off, conservative, and religious.

After high school, Hopper went to the New York School of Art, where he met and studied with realist painters William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. Hopper was particularly influenced by Chase, as well as by the work of Edouard Manet and Edward Degas. Henri also had a profound impact on Hopper’s early development and is known for his advice to students: "Forget about art and paint pictures of what interests you in life.”

After art school, Hopper made three trips to check out the art scene in Europe, where he primarily focused on realist painting such as Rembrandt’s Night Watch. Of the iconic work, Hopper said: "the most wonderful thing of his I have seen; it's past belief in its reality.”

After returning from abroad, he rented a studio in New York City in 1912. He was slow to define his own work. His friend the illustrator Walter Tittle describes Hopper’s depressed emotional state: "suffering . . . from long periods of unconquerable inertia, sitting for days at a time before his easel in helpless unhappiness, unable to raise a hand to break the spell." One can only imagine what it must have been like for such a gifted, yet conservatively minded talent during the evolution of cubism and other subsequent art movements. I find this emotional conundrum to be at the core of the tension in Hopper’s work. To be so out of step with the most critically acclaimed art of your time, while having a deeply original personal vision.

In 1923 Hopper met Josephine Nivison, also one of Robert Henri's former students, whom he would marry the following year. Unlike Edward, who was tall (6’5”), introspective, shy, secretive, and conservative, Jo was short, open, liberal, gregarious, and sociable. Despite also being an artist, Jo subordinated her career to manage his career and interviews, living a reclusive life together. She became his primary model. They remained life-long partners, although their marriage was complex, and not without struggle.

Hopper's personal and professional lives were filled with contrasting realities. I see this as a possible, and partial, impetus for the profound life force of his paintings. Although he often painted seemingly banal scenes of American everyday life, the paintings are brimming with pure visual intensity that were created in a slow, determined manner; every part deeply considered. Almost no other realist painter, to my eye, has ever created so much weighty coloristic visual poetry in his work. Hopper had a kind of supernatural ability to mix and create original color harmonies. I have long thought, when standing in front of a great Hopper painting, you can feel the color viscerally in your body. Hopper, by the relatively conservative nature of his imagery can be easily overlooked. His technique is not flashy, but more plodding. He liked to fully work out his compositions before beginning to paint. In some cases he’d make as many as fifty preparatory drawings. His use of geometric underpinnings in his compositions, combined with his use of tonality and temperature to create visual rhythms, lead your eye in a workman-like, yet effortless, balanced dance around his surfaces. His use of lead white gave a luminosity to his subtle and vivid color choices, creating a poetic visual experience that, as he said about Rembrandt, is “past belief in its reality.”

This is what I personally look for in painting. Paint that transcends and becomes more real than reality itself. All paintings are just a bunch of marks. They are all abstractions first. It’s always about the quality of invention for me. Hopper was one of the best visual inventors that has ever lived. I have the experience at concerts, too, when I feel a direct transmission from the musicians into my being. I’m in the music, and the musicians are beyond playing notes.

Room in New York, 1932, in the collection of Sheldon Museum of Art is a particularly superb example of Hopper’s mature work. It is essentially an abstract masterpiece. Tightly knit, but ever so relaxed at the same time. The numerous shades of mixed greens and mixed reds, set off by the color of the back of the newspaper the man is reading and the intensity of the subtle blue of his tie. And the quiet gentleness of the reflection of the woman’s arm resting on the table and the blue light on the edge of the doily created by the shadow from the newspaper. The range of clarity of the various parts of the painting, from the loosely painted column and window and front of the building with it’s cool and warm temperatures and dark-to-light-to-dark rhythms. The relative carefulness and opacity of the figures themselves. Then back to the washy brushy gestural quality of the alizarin and blue-gray landscape above the man. The variety of ways the door is painted in different areas. The dark rectangle at the top of the door to keep the tonal rhythms alive throughout the composition. The varied slightly darker green walls to the left and right, giving a central glow behind and on the figures. The intense compact organization of shapes and colors in and around the woman at the piano, separating it from how the man is articulated. All the perfect, but hard won variety of parts, every one meaningful, everywhere you look.

I suggest listening to the clues found in Hopper’s own words about the meaning in his works. He said he was more interested in the light, shadows and forms, than in any sort of symbolism. I find this kind of honesty refreshing. When his wife Jo remarked about his painting Cape Cod Morning, a personal favorite of his, "It's a woman looking out to see if the weather's good enough to hang out her wash," Hopper retorted, "Did I say that? You're making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view, she's just looking out the window.” In an interview in which he was being somewhat critical of many of his earlier paintings, Hopper said that he still enjoyed Cape Cod Morning and that it was “nearer to my thought about things.” I believe Hopper was basically painting his own personal vision, never to be fully understood by others. This is why the truth in them rings so profoundly clear.

Edward Hopper
Nyack, NY 1882–New York, NY 1967
Room in New York
Oil on canvas, 1932
29 × 36 5/8 inches
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, H–166.1936

  More info

Pages