Terra Collection Initiative: Continental Shift: Nineteenth-Century American and Australian Landscape Painting

Continental Shift: Nineteenth Century American and Australian Landscape Painting was the result of an innovative partnership between the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the University of Western Australia, and University of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art. The cross-cultural exhibition brought together nineteenth-century landscape paintings from Australia and the United States drawn from the collections of the partner institutions, including Australian paintings by John Glover, Eugene Von Guérard, Louis Buvelot, William Piguenit, and Frederick McCubbin, as well as American paintings by Thomas Cole, Martin Johnson Heade, Fitz Henry Lane, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and George Inness, among others.

Continental Shift explored how the landscape traditions of colonial Australia and the early national United States recycled the familiar formats of European traditions or pioneered new forms for capturing the alterity of unfamiliar lands. The paintings in Continental Shift depicted the dialectical relationship between clearing the land and worshipping the sublimity of wilderness. The cross-cultural exhibition and related course also explored the relevance of nineteenth-century Australian and American landscape paintings to current thinking on economic development, migration, cultural conflict, ethnic displacement, and climate change, and the Anthropocene.

Continental Shift was accompanied by a two-day scholarly symposium (September 27–28, 2016) and a university course led by Professor Richard Read, Senior Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts at University of Western Australia. The course was augmented by visiting lecturers, including two specialists from the United States, Professor Rachael Z. DeLue, Associate Professor of Art History at Princeton University, and Professor Kenneth Haltman, H. Russell Pitman Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma.

The exhibition was on view at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, where the Terra Foundation’s U.S. paintings were contextualized by Australian landscape paintings drawn from the Ian Potter’s renowned collection as Not as Songs of other Lands: Nineteenth Century Australian and American Landscape Painting. As at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Ian Potter Museum of Art exhibition was the subject of a university course and symposium.