Join the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Chief Curator Naomi Slipp, as she discusses the museum’s current exhibition, Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-Century American Landscapes. Naomi will discuss how women of the nineteenth-century were faced with limited opportunities presented during their lifetimes, but how some carved out successful careers as professional artists painting landscapes and still lifes. During this time period, most women were either trained by a male family member, supported by their husband, or engaged in amateur art making as a local practice. Others may not have considered themselves fine artists, but worked as artisans in professional settings, decorating china, glass, and other objects. Many practiced needle arts and domestic handicrafts, decorating their own homes with stitched outdoor scenery or floral motifs, giving designs as gifts, or selling pieces to consumers. Most of them also balanced the demands of motherhood, caregiving, or domestic labor.  In this hour-long talk, explore how these women found productive avenues to express their appreciation for the American scene and engage in creative expression. Female artists cultivated the widespread taste for American scenery in fine art and popular culture, and, as creators and consumers, it was women who brought the American landscape into the American home, naturalizing it for everyone.

About the Exhibition
Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-Century American Landscapes is an exciting and timely invitation to view paintings held in private hands and usually hung behind closed doors – allowing exploration of the many meanings of the American landscape, both historically to nineteenth-century viewers and today for twenty-first century audiences. The exhibition offers a layered interpretation of the cultural and historical meaning of such paintings. Themes explored include the environmental and cultural violence underlying nineteenth-century American landscape painting, including manifest destiny, settler colonialism, and Native removal; material extraction and industrial expansion; agricultural development and fisheries; and global exploration and imperialist projects. By interrogating the place of gender, race and ethnicity, as well as environment and ecology, we re/frame the view and stage meaningful conversations about historical and contemporary issues and events. To learn more about or visit the exhibition, visit Reframing the View Exhibition page.