“MOUNT ADAMS, WASHINGTON, 1875”: This oil on canvas painting by Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) is featured in “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment,” an exhibition encompassing three centuries of American art. It is at the Princeton University Art Museum through January 6, 2019. Admission is free.

The story of our changing relationship with the natural world is comprehensively told through this exhibition encompassing three centuries of American art. “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment” presents more than 120 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, videos,  and works of decorative art, from the colonial period to the present, exploring for the first time how American artists of different traditions and backgrounds have both reflected and shaped environmental understanding while contributing to the development of a modern ecological consciousness.

The result is a major reinterpretation of American art that examines both iconic masterpieces and rarely seen objects through a lens uniting art historical interpretation with environmental history, scientific analysis and the dynamic field of ecocriticism. The exhibit runs through Jan. 6, 2019.

This exhibition engages a wide range of genres and historical contexts – from colonial furniture to the art of Jeffersonian natural science, from Hudson River landscape painting to Native American basketry, from Dust Bowl regionalism to modernist abstraction and postwar environmental activism – highlighting the evolving ecological implications of subjects and contexts of creation as well as artistic materials and techniques. 

The exhibition presents works by more than 100 artists, including John James Audubon, George Bellows, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Thomas Eakins, Theaster Gates, Winslow Homer, Louisa Keyser, Dorothea Lange, Ana Mendieta, Thomas Moran, Isamu Noguchi, Georgia O’Keeffe, Maya Lin, Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Willson Peale, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexis Rockman, Robert Smithson, Carleton Watkins and Andrew Wyeth.

For more information, visit artmuseum.princeton.edu.