The mid-nineteenth century, often called the “American Renaissance,” was a time when  writers and artists made a conscious effort to create a uniquely “American” vision—one that differed from European models. They embraced the challenge of depicting what they viewed as a new utopia--an unspoiled and vast continent.  Painters and writers saw themselves as "seers," pushing their work into visionary realms.  They drew on American experience and places, like Whitman’s Manhattan and Brooklyn, Thoreau’s Walden Pond and Thomas Cole’s Hudson River Valley.  Melville’s stories of whaling and life at sea and the Luminist painters’ visions of sky, light and ocean all helped to shape an “American” identity. We will explore the relationships between the writing and the art and learn how the Transcendentalists in writing and oratory mirrored the Luminists in painting, expressed through a veneration of nature. We will include the experience of women, such as Abby Williams Hill, a notable landscape artist who braved bears, frostbite and a stampeding mule train to paint in the Cascades (while not neglecting her six children and being active in the early childhood education movement).  We will ask why this period is still compelling and how this “American” identity continues to resonate in our culture.

As part of our study, we will learn formal analysis of text and image and we will also incorporate creative writing—another way to link words with images.  Moving from theory to practice, we will create assemblages, such as the Cornell Box, that allow us to express through art what we have learned about American literature and art history.  As the Tacoma Art Museum has recently opened its new wing, housing one of the largest collections of art of the American West, we will visit the museum, bringing our practice of formal analysis as a generative lens through which we understand both iconic and new American “ways of seeing.”  

Credits will be awarded in Art History and American Literature