poem

FINDING A

Sense of Place AT ROLLING ACRES FARM

BY CARL LITTLE

For all of us have our loved places; all of us have laid claim to parts of the earth; and all of us, whether we know it or not, are in some measure the products of our sense of place.

— ALAN GUSSOW, A SENSE OF PLACE: THE ARTIST AND THE AMERICAN LAND

In 1964, Consolidated Edison proposed building a hydro-electric power plant near Storm King Mountain in the Hudson River Valley. The painter Alan Gussow and his family lived nearby, in Congers, New York, and he decided to speak out against the plan, taking what he called “the side of the river.” At a legislative meeting, he read from T.S. Eliot and Nehru’s will, the part where the Indian leader paid tribute to the Ganga (Ganges) River, “a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present and flowing on to the great ocean of the future.”

Energized by what would eventually be a successful campaign against the utility, Gussow stopped teaching art in 1968 to devote more time to doing his “damnedest” to protect the environment. In a review of Martica Sawin’s 2009 monograph Alan Gussow: A Painter’s Nature, art critic Edgar Allen Beem referred to him as “a pioneer of the art of engagement.”

Speaking with New York Times critic Grace Glueck in 1972, Gussow argued that there should be an artist-in-residence program in America’s national parks, “just as there are poets and writers in residence at universities.” Soon afterwards, he convinced the National Park Service to start such a program—and he took the first turn, at the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1968. “My job was to be inspired by the location,” he recalled, “and create paintings that would reflect experience.”

Possessed by the idea that “once an artist puts a value on a place, it helps to preserve it,” Gussow