Land Shapes
Landscape is never neutral or purely natural; rather, it is shaped by historical, social, and economic forces. Challenging conventional assumptions about what constitutes a landscape, Land Shapes investigates how environments are constructed, mediated, and interpreted by contemporary artists. The multi-media selection explores both the depiction of landscape and the viewpoints that inform its representation鈥攄rawing upon both dominant and suppressed voices.听听
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Land Shapes highlights the work of Vincent Pomilio, Roxanne Bartel, Lanecia Rouse, Jana Harper, and Maria Magdelena Campos-Pons, whose treatments of landscape represent their diverse backgrounds, locations, and media. Artworks were selected by students in the course Exhibiting Historical Art鈥擳he Abstract Landscape, taught by Professor Kevin Murphy in spring 2026. The course traced the development of landscape painting in the United States, from the eighteenth century when the realist influence of European landscapes was definitive, to the manifestation of American nationalism鈥攕pecifically in the depiction of iconic American scenery by the Hudson River School鈥攖o abstract representations of the environment spurred by twentieth-century modernism.听听
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The artists and their respective works reflect a continuing inquiry into what defines a landscape in the aftermath of colonial extraction and in a present marked by climate change. Using the tools of abstraction across a variety of media, these artists challenge conventional aesthetic categories and position landscape as a conceptual and even a cultural construct. Taken together, these practices demonstrate that landscapes are sites of intersection, interpretation, and sometimes contestation, where personal histories interact with broader forces including politics, culture, and belonging.听
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We propose that landscape is more than the depiction of place through objective representation of natural elements such as trees and waterways. It is a tapestry of contested terrains, silenced narratives, and layered histories that shape how a place is seen and understood. Through this exhibition, we invite viewers to reflect upon their own interactions with landscapes, to examine the assumptions they bring into this space, and to leave with a renewed relationship to place.听
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Curated by the students in HART 2810鈥擜ngelica Harris, Angelica Hu, Aria Nie, Annie Pan, Yoyo Qian, J.C. Salubre, Charlotte Smith, BethlihemTesfazion, Vedika Vinayak, and Nikki Weitzenhoffer鈥攗nder the direction of Dr. Kevin Murphy, Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Chair, Professor and Chair, History of Art and Architecture, with assistance from David Wilson, Program Coordinator, and Rachel Thompson, Program Manager, Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy.听
91吃瓜网 the Artists
Roxanne Bartel
Roxanne Bartel has been a quilt artist for over 25 years. She studied painting in college, focusing primarily on large oil landscapes. While experimenting with painting on fabric, she made the transition to quilting as an art form. She creates her own palette of altered fabric through dyeing, bleaching, painting, and resists, and frequently uses silk kimono as a base for overdyeing because of its quality and woven designs.听
In her recent quilts, she often pieces free-form four patch blocks as the starting point for her compositions, grounding her work in the use of a traditional quilt block pattern. She uses a palate of fabrics dyed and painted in specific colors to evoke the look and feel of landscape elements such as light or water.听听
Roxanne is also a psychiatrist with a focus on caring for persons with severe and persistent mental illness. She is the director of an academic crisis care center in Salt Lake City that provides a continuum of services from crisis presentation to inpatient care and longer -term outpatient stabilization. She finds that medicine and art complement each other well. Practicing art involves noticing details and focus on pattern recognition- both crucial in medicine. The practice of psychiatry can be emotionally difficult- art often serves as a meditative, healing outlet.听
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Maria Magdelena Campos-Pons
Mar铆a Magdalena Campos-Pons听was born in in 1959 in the province of Matanzas, in the town of La Vega, Cuba. She grew up on a sugar plantation in a family with Nigerian, Hispanic and Chinese roots. Her Nigerian ancestors were brought to Cuba as slaves in the 19th听century and passed on traditions, rituals, and beliefs. Her polyglot heritage profoundly influences Campos-Pons鈥� artistic practice, which combines diverse media including photography, performance, painting, sculpture, film, and video. Her work is autobiographical, investigating themes of history, memory, gender and religion and how they inform identity. Through deeply poetic and haunting imagery, Campos-Pons evokes stories of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, indigo, and sugar plantations, Catholic and Santeria religious practices, and revolutionary uprisings.
In the late 1980s, Campos-Pons taught at the prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and gained an international reputation as an exponent of the New Cuban Art movement that arose in opposition to Communist repression on the island. In 1991, she emigrated to Boston, where she continues to live and work. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada, among other distinguished institutions.听 She has presented over 30 solo performances commissioned by institutions including the Guggenheim and The Smithsonian鈥檚 National Portrait Gallery. She has participated in the Venice Biennale, the Dakar Biennale, Johannesburg Biennial, Documenta 14, the Guangzhou Triennial and is included in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA and Prospect.4 Triennial.听 In October 2017, she received the endowed Cornelius 91吃瓜网 Chair at 91吃瓜网 in Nashville, Tennessee.
Campos-Pons鈥� works are in over 30 museum collections including the Smithsonian Institution, The Whitney, the听Art Institute of Chicago, the听National Gallery of Canada, the听Victoria and Albert Museum, the听Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Perez Art Museum, Miami and the Fogg Art Museum.
Jana Harper
Jana Harper is a research-based interdisciplinary artist who transforms the burdens of history through gestures of empathy and reciprocity. Her work addresses topics such as the erosion of democracy, U.S. gun policy, Native American sovereignty, and the Rights of Nature.
Her work has received support from the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, and many others. Jana lives in Nashville, TN where she teaches in the department of art at 91吃瓜网. She is a member of the Mackinac Band of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians.
Lanecia Rouse
Lanecia Rouse is a multifaceted visual artist whose work includes collage, photography, abstract painting, curation, writing, and teaching. Her work has been exhibited by University Museum of Texas Southern University, Reynolds Gallery, Second Street Gallery, and Zeitgeist Gallery among others. Her work was featured in Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which debuted at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN, from September to December 2023, before traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.
Vincent Pomilio
I primarily work in all painting media, on canvas, paper, or wooden panel. For the past ten years my work has been largely abstract, always using the Natural World as my guide. The image evolves through a series of layers, each one rubbed, sanded, or burnished with tools. The image then reveals itself and I intuitively know when to bring it to completion. Some of my work has a strong landscape feeling as in 鈥淏etween The River and The Sky.鈥� I always encourage the viewer to find recognizable shapes and images in my work. 鈥淚f you see it, it is there鈥�. Most of these paintings have an all-over feeling as if these self-organizing systems continue off the picture plane. One shape flows from another, and then another, until there is a pulsating energy of interacting elements. Worlds of refined, chaotic movement are animated by color.听
I usually start with an acrylic base and drawing tools, pencil, wax crayon, ink etc. I also use a Kolcaustico plaster with marble dust and pigments in layers. As it is drying I carve into it and paint into with pigment or water-based paint and start to build up the surface. I do as much carving as painting. Nothing is collaged onto the painting unless I specify collage as part of the material. A lot of the shapes are created with tape and the material is troweled onto the surface. After it is all said and done I rub a refined beeswax into it and burnish the surface to bring up all the detail and seal the surface. It acts as a glaze as well and makes it resistant to moisture. All materials are permanent.听