SHELBURNE, VT.- New England Now, Shelburne Museum’s inaugural exhibition in a biennial series featuring contemporary artists organized around thematic subject matters, is on view from September 15, 2018 through January 13, 2019.

New England Now challenges the notion of the Northeast’s long-accepted stereotype as stagnant and quaint, and instead plumbs its evolving identities and complex beauty. Building upon scholarship on the visual construction of the region, this exhibition explores the contemporary landscape, capturing the changing environment. From disintegrating historic buildings and disappearing “virgin” land, New England Now reveals our evolving landscape.

“New England has long played a special role in the national imagination and as a proving ground for artists from the early 19th century to today,” said Shelburne Museum Director, Tom Denenberg. “As a premier institution contributing to New England’s artistic conversation, Shelburne Museum has a special responsibility to reflect on and nourish the region’s creative culture.”

In this, the biennial’s inaugural exhibition, curated by Denenberg and Shelburne Museum Assistant Curator, Carolyn Bauer, the featured artists work in two-dimensional art—painting and photography—to explore the striking human interventions of housing, factories, and highways.

“Somewhat of happenstance, as the checklist for the exhibition developed, it became readily apparent that the works of art shared another common trait,” said Bauer. “Most of the pieces are large to monumental in scale. While the large size may be a reflection of the expansive natural wonder and awe of the subject matter of landscape, in effect it also creates an immersive viewing experience.”

New England has long played an important role in the American imagination. An idealized land of promise for European settlers in the 17th century, the region stood as the most industrial part of the United States by the time of the Civil War. The arts and letters flourished in growing manufacturing cities and American political thought largely reflected New England principles. In short order, the region came to represent the nation as a whole. Massachusetts poets became American poets, New Hampshire’s White Mountains a national landscape. For a time, New England seemed poised to maintain this economic and cultural authority over the rest of the country, but that did not happen as both moved West in the second half of the 19th century. The clock started to wind backward. New England steadily evolved into a region where, as often as not, the past became the story rather than the setting. New England became Old New England, celebrated as a historical curiosity—quiescent, even quaint.

New England Now is a response to the visual culture of Old New England. In recent decades, contemporary artists have again begun to plumb the concept of region. Rather than recycle images of autumnal foliage, red barns, or the frothy Atlantic coast, painters and photographers now explore places once vital. Silent factories and flooded quarries mark the landscape as surely as skidder tracks on logging roads. Floodlights illuminate empty parking lots at night as lonely houses mark the gloom of winter in New England. Time moves on and modes of expression change, however sentiment endures. New England remains a powerful organizing myth in American culture.

Urban Expansion
Although small towns loom large in the collective memory of New England, the region has boasted cities of scale since the 18th century. Today, cultural and demographic changes are actively reshaping the region’s landscape. While the effects of growing and shifting populations have long contributed to suburban sprawl, urbanization has taken a new path in recent years with renewed interest in smaller, densely populated historic cities. The urban fringe of automobile-age malls is fading as new trends in consumer culture bring goods to rural areas as easily as logging on to a computer. Like a living organism, the expansion of urban and suburban territories grows and contracts over time, marking changes in its wake and creating new patterns on the land.

The artists included in this section investigate the complicated relationship between new developments in historical places. While often stark in contrasts of materials, forms, and colors, these works of art explore the unexpected beauty and acceptance of invasively spreading development.
Industrialization

The epicenter of America’s Industrial Revolution, New England has long been at the forefront of manufacturing. By the late 18th century, few communities lacked a sawmill or a gristmill. From these modest beginnings, industry took hold. By the time of the Civil War, the “New England” factory system had spread out from pioneering planned cities like Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, bringing ever-larger brick mills to the far corners of New England. Centers of production—from textile and paper mills to marble and granite quarries—created a cultural topography of industry. Mill towns and manufacturing cities adhered to a rigid social geography, with elaborate stratification of housing dictating where owners, managers, and workers lived in proximity to the factory.

Despite this long industrial heritage, the popular image of Old New England is principally rural, pastoral, and untouched by time and change. Today, while the perception of quaint New England is crucial to the region’s economic security as a tourist destination, there remains a strong industrial presence. The artists featured here embrace and celebrate the inclusion of human interventions, man-made materials, production, and commerce by embedding these themes into the New England landscape.

Rural Repose
New England’s agricultural economy waned in the last quarter of the 19th century. As early as 1892, the writer Kate Sanborn encouraged her readers to make the move “from Gotham to Gooseville” in her book, Adopting an Abandoned Farm. The prevalence of fallow agricultural land and empty buildings gave rise to a tourist economy in the region—New England became a place to visit the past. Antiquated old houses were subject to restoration and renewal; small towns passed over by economic activity at the turn of the century became models for suburban development after World War II. Rural repose—a place of ease and privacy—became an answer to the hustle and bustle of modernity.

Decay has long been attractive to artists—witness any number of historical painters taking Roman ruins for their subject matter while on the grand tour of Italy. Quiescence is subtly different, however. A handful of artists in New England Now focus on patina and decline, but taken as a whole, the region offers repose rather than ruin. A silently aging place, New England remains a therapeutic answer to the vicissitudes of modern life.

New Neighborhoods
The landscape of New England is a stratigraphy, as each generation adds a new layer to the existing region. In times of economic growth new architectural forms—factories, malls, housing developments—bring new patterns to the land and life. These modern neighborhoods often have to reckon with the old, both physically and socially. A raft of houses springing up in a farmer’s field is a common sight today. Not only do these structures change the experience of place for the community, they also bring myriad downstream alterations to the landscape—additional gas stations, more coffee shops, and dry cleaners—the infrastructure of daily life. New neighborhoods add to, and push against, historical developments to create a unique texture to the built environments in New England.