The Romanticization of the West: A Virtual Conversation

Enjoy a virtual conversation between Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, Richard & Mary Holland Assistant Curator of American Western Art at the Joslyn Art Museum, and contemporary artist Nathaniel Ruleaux, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, whose work addresses westward expansion in relation to his family’s history and historical imagery.

They will discuss ownership, westward expansion, and culturally determined concepts of the human relationship to nature and the land presented by works on view in The Bierstadt Brothers and Order / Reorder. Busciglio-Ritter will talk about painters like Albert Bierstadt, who played on nostalgia for “wilderness” and myths about the “frontier,” and Frank Tenney Johnson, who traveled west to photograph Indigenous and Mexican people and then used this visual archive to create his paintings. Ruleaux will focus on works by Indigenous artists and discuss the tangible physical connection between the body and the natural world.

Support provided by Art Bridges.