Museum curators often receive public inquiries, and sometimes an outside person can be very helpful to gaining better insight on a painting or object in the museum. For Karen McWhorter, the curator of the Whitney Western Art Museum, a call from a professor made her look at George Catlin’s “Mandan-View of the Missouri Above the […]
Originally published in Points West magazineSummer 2009 On the heels of Lewis and Clark: Charles Fritz follows the inspiring visions of western artist-explorers By Christine C. BrindzaFormer Curatorial Assistant, Whitney Western Art Museum The work we are now doing is, I trust, done for posterity, in such a way that they need not repeat it. […]
When George Catlin traveled up the Missouri River into present-day Montana, he admired the Native American peoples of the Great Plains and observed the bison herds as one of their critical resources. Fearing that the looming decimation of bison would devastate the livelihoods of Native peoples, Catlin proposed the creation of a “nation’s park” in […]
Bierstadt’s painting The Last of the Buffalo served as a final, desperate call to save a species from near-certain annihilation. But he was not the first—nor the last—to use an artist’s tools in support of environmental conservation. Throughout the 19th century and beyond artists shaped perceptions of the American bison and voiced early concerns about […]
Originally published in Points West in Fall 2010 Paul Dyck pays tribute to his idol, George Catlin, one of the first to document the Plains Indians in art. In this work from 1964, Dyck incorporates original images by Catlin using Flemish and Asian painting techniques. An artist in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, Catlin traveled West […]
Originally published in Points West magazineFall 2000 Catlin Showed Us By Edith JacobsonFormer Intern, Whitney Western Art Museum By the 1830s America was beginning what is now known as “The Era of Westward Expansion.” What did those first settlers know about the West? What did they expect? At that time, the American frontier was the land west of […]