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Land as Landscape

Within historic Western art, perhaps no topic has received a more thorough artistic treatment than landscape and wilderness. Some contemporary artists choose to venerate open spaces as a grand, if dwindling, American resource; others investigate the tension between such ideals and the development or destruction of other parts of the Western landscape. Within the contemporary West, protected spaces such as Yosemite and the Grand Canyon must increasingly vie for artistic attention with freeways and other forms of change and occupation; even the atomic blast becomes artistic fodder for those interested in how art has been used to aesthetically construct and visually distinguish land from landscape across the West.

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