Deconstructing Landscape by Thoma Foundation

Deconstructing Landscape

The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation

Deconstructing Landscape

April 7, 2025–Early 2026

Dallas, TX

TRADITIONAL MEDIA: POST-WAR, CONTEMPORARY, AND SOUTHWESTERN 60

PHOTOGRAPHY 86

ART OF THE SPANISH AMERICAS 96

JAPANESE BAMBOO 108

Drawn from the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation collection, Deconstructing Landscape features artists who offer unique interpretations of the traditional picturesque landscape across a variety of genres: time-based media, Art of the Spanish Americas, photography, painting, and sculpture.

Landscape-based art is a vital and vibrant theme in the Thoma Foundation’s collection, reflecting the Thomas’ deep-rooted connection to the land. From Carl’s upbringing as a thirdgeneration cattle rancher in the Oklahoma panhandle to the couple’s continued stewardship of their New Mexico ranch and Oregon vineyard, the environment is central to their story. The Foundation continues this century-long legacy, combining tradition and innovation to strengthen art and education initiatives in our communities and beyond.

Throughout history, artists have responded to the seductive and often sublime drama of the open sky, infinite sea, mountains, forests, sunsets, and sunrises. They have captured, channeled, and, at times, deconstructed nature’s potential for rapture. Through their work, artists process this experience of the natural world—its power to provoke our imagination and awaken our sense of the spiritual.

In the words of Jean Cousteau, “For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century, he is beginning to realize that, to survive, he must protect it.” In this current historical moment, a time when our natural landscapes are under threat from increasingly fearsome ecological forces, it is essential, and especially poignant, to see nature through the lens of artistic expression.

With Deconstructing Landscape, the Thoma Foundation invites you to embrace this experience and welcome its inspiration. It is a reminder of our relationship to the natural world not only as spectators but as stewards.

1 Leo Villareal, Sky (study), 2009. Custom electronics, circuitry, LEDs, painted wood, Plexiglas

In Sky (study), Leo Villareal programmed light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to simulate the hyperactive colors seen in the sky at sunrise and sunset. The pulsating composition is generated by computer code and can move in an identifiable pattern or appear completely random. Villareal reimagines the atmospheric display as an abstract color field painting, but one whose formal qualities shift over time. Like any abstract work, the form can resemble a known entity in the real world, like the sun, or it can literally be a manifestation of the technology itself.

This artwork was a study for a large digital mural permanently installed in 2012 at the federal courthouse in El Paso, Texas.

LEO VILLAREAL (b. 1967, Albuquerque, NM) is an American installation, digital, and light artist. He is internationally renowned for his large-scale public LED installations. They are among the world’s largest electronic light artworks, including works that span across San Francisco’s Bay Bridge and along the Thames River in London. His work explores spatial and temporal resolution and how it interacts with the physical world. Villareal is interested in the lowest common denominators—pixels in digital imagery and the zeroes and ones in binary code. He is inspired by mathematician John Conway’s work with cellular automata and the Game of Life. Central to Villareal’s LED sculptures is the element of change, so he sets parameters for opacity, speed, and scale and creates an environment in which nascent, undefined outcomes can occur.

2 Dan Flavin, untitled, 1964. Red and yellow fluorescent lights

Dan Flavin referred to his related drawings as “diagrams,” highlighting the technical nature of these artworks as schematics; Untitled (1964) is based on drawing proposition #3 May 15, 1964 and has been exhibited under the same title. Flavin’s use of light as an artistic medium emphasizes light as the basis for human vision and, by extension, the basis for all visual art. The simple composition of Untitled (1964) transforms the fluorescent bulb from a mass-produced artifact of antiseptic corporate offices into an evocation of the sunrise on the horizon.

DAN FLAVIN (b. 1933, New York, NY; d. 1996, Riverhead, NY) was a minimalist sculptor and installation artist who used fluorescent light as a new material in the 1960s to explore color relationships. Flavin’s first works were drawings and paintings influenced by Abstract Expressionism—mixed media collages that included found street objects. He began his first sketches for electric light sculptures while working as a guard at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1968, his sketches were realized into room-size sculptures and light environment installations. He favored creating site-specific “situations” or “proposals” rather than studio production, and until his works sold, the pieces only existed as sketches or single exhibition copies. Flavin rejected the categories of “painting” and “sculpture,” referring to his artworks employing fluorescent bulbs as “installations,” “systems,” or “propositions,” underscoring the relationship between the artwork and its environment.

3 Craig Dorety, Offset Circles-Yellow Flowering Tree Against Blue Sky, 2014. Custom electronics, LEDs, aluminum panel

Craig Dorety’s meditative, time-based sculptures use vibrant, animated gradients of light to create the illusion of movement and three-dimensionality. In this work, a digital representation of a yellow flowering tree, originally a static internet image, is “stretched” into pixels and fed through a lightbox much like a filmstrip, one line at a time, thirty frames per second. The lightbox contains nine sandwiched screens and curvilinear bands of LEDs. The result is an attempt to replicate visual hallucinations the artist has experienced during ocular migraines.

On a more complex conceptual level, Dorety says he is trying to capture the visual qualities the subconscious “sees” and represent the brain’s distorted perception of space-time.

CRAIG DORETY (b. 1973, Oakland, CA) is an artist trained in mathematics and mechanical engineering. He began as an electronic musician, creating custom music technology under the name Komega. Dorety developed a visual art practice while working in the San Francisco studio of LED art pioneer Jim Campbell. His work embodies scientific realism, using information systems and data sets as subject matter. His three-dimensional, layered light sculptures utilize LED technology and custom firmware to convey his perception of space-time distortions.

4 Guillermo Galindo, Waveform Coded Landscape, 2015. Inkjet print; acrylic ink on cut Hahnemühle photo rag paper

Waveform Coded Landscape is a musical score for a silent song written to commemorate the thousands of undocumented migrants who have died while crossing the US–Mexico border. Guillermo Galindo wrote the score after recording sounds in the border town of Laredo, Texas, and along the Rio Grande River— the buzz of cicadas, the drone of the river—turning that collected audio into the abstract visual data represented here. The soundscape includes names of the deceased converted into punched holes, a melody that could theoretically be performed by a player piano or computer but here must be imagined rather than heard.

GUILLERMO GALINDO (b. 1960, Mexico City) is a computer, performance, sound, and visual artist. As a self-described postMexican, he confronts stereotypes of Mexican art and identity. His work spans commissioned orchestral compositions, opera, sonic sculptures, three-dimensional installations, and visual art, exploring the intersections of politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality, and social awareness. In 2011, Galindo collaborated with American photographer Richard Misrach to create Border Cantos, which features Misrach’s photographs of the U.S.Mexico border and Galindo’s sonic art and graphic musical scores. Border Cantos became an award-winning book and traveling exhibition, visiting many venues, including The Cantor Museum, The High Line in New York, Crystal Bridges, and the San Jose Museum of Art. In addition to his printed artworks, Galindo performs sound art using instruments from trash collected at the border, which he electrifies and plays at international venues. Galindo is a professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

5 Elias Sime, FORTHCOMING 6, 2009-2010. Reclaimed electrical wires, circuit boards, nails on panel

Much like the work in Elias Sime’s later Tightrope series, this collage of found materials serves as a commentary on the global exchange of values across economic, technological, and cultural systems. The salvaged objects are the used-up detritus of the Western world, but Sime transforms them into art, in this case, inspired by the textures of traditional Ethiopian weaving and needlework. The resulting composition—abstract and intriguing —is more than a mere gesture of recycling; the reconstituted work has its own cultural status, as essential and substantive as any piece of technology. “Each material I collect has its own story, . . . its own language,” the artist says. “All the different stories related to the material move me, and I transform these intuitive reactions into my compositions.”

ELIAS SIME (b. 1968, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is an Ethiopian visual, sculpture, and textile artist, creating work in Addis Ababa since the early 1990s. He uses industrial materials and electronic waste from Addis Ababa’s Mercato, where tech materials from the West travel along a global network. In 2009, Sime rose to international prominence when commissioned to design the stage for Oedipus Rex at the Sydney Opera House in Australia, which was quickly followed by the Met Museum acquiring his work. He creates regularly commissioned mural-scale artworks for public and private buildings and has exhibited extensively worldwide in biennales, galleries, and museums. In 2019, he co-founded the Zoma Museum with his creative partner, curator, and anthropologist Meskerem Assegued. The Zoma, influential in the contemporary Ethiopian visual art sphere, hosts an artist-in-residency program, an elementary school, an art school, galleries, and an edible garden. Sime’s work is included in the permanent collections of over forty institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa.

6 Yael Kanarek, Terrain 9_3a_5: Entries and Exits, 2002.

Acrylic face-mounted chromogenic print on paper, with hand-applied ink drawing

This imaginary landscape rendered with 3D modeling software is derived from Kanarek’s online artwork, World of Awe: A Traveler’s Journal (www.worldofawe.net), in which users navigate a virtual world called Sunrise/Sunset. In this parallel world, time is suspended at dawn or dusk, gravity is optional, and “death remains undefined.” The interactive artwork incorporates early Macintosh graphical user interface (GUI) design and Microsoft Windows menus to tell the story of a lone traveler hunting for treasure in Silicon Canyon, a junkyard for all the hardware and software ever created. Trekking across this terrain symbolizes the quest and, thus, the material basis for modern digital technologies, and users are encouraged to reflect on society’s obsession with the constant march of technological progress. The annotations on the print are hand-drawn and record tracking data—paths and time stamps—of users traversing the desert landscape of World of Awe.

YAEL KANAREK (b. 1967, New York, NY) is an Israeli American artist known for electronic literature, conceptual and digital art, painting, photography, and sculpture. A pioneer of early internet art, she explores language and multilingualism on the internet and how they create spaces of meaning. Her work focuses on storytelling and translation, reshaping cultural associations of language, text, and sculpture. In 2013, she founded KANAREK, a fine jewelry company specializing in text. In 2016, she began the Toratah (Her Torah), a project born from a feminist awareness that rewrites the Torah by reversing the genders of all appearing figures. Kanarek’s subject matter is often minimalist or made of formal abstractions, working from her hypothesis that language and numerals render reality, and this reality is a subjective field. She received her BFA from Empire State College and MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and teaches Net Art at Pratt Institute’s MFA program. She has received numerous accolades, including the Rockefeller 2005 New Media Fellowship, and participated in artist residencies.

John Gerrard, Flag (Amazon), 2017, Real-time generative custom software animation (color, silent), LCD monitor in custom steel frame (left to right)

8 John Gerrard, Flag (Nile), 2017. Real-time generative custom software animation (color, silent), LCD monitor in custom steel frame

John Gerrard, Flag (Yangtze), 2017. Real-time generative custom software animation (color, silent), LCD monitor in custom steel frame

John Gerrard, Flag (Danube), 2017. Real-time generative custom software animation (color, silent), LCD monitor in custom steel frame

These four works depict simulations of oil spills on the Danube, Amazon, Yangtze, and Nile rivers. Hypnotically rippling with the shifting waters, these scenes are generated using powerful video gaming engines. As is typical with John Gerrard’s work, the works are nondurational. They are rendered live, with each simulation correspondings to the real- time of day in the location depicted. In each, the iridescent petroleum slick, fluttering on the surface of the water like a flag in the wind, is algorithmically programmed never to disperse. Gerrard’s selection of rivers from different corners of the planet implies that the prioritization of industry over the environment is a global issue.

JOHN GERRARD (b. 1974 in North Tipperary, Ireland) is an Irish digital simulation and sculpture artist. He blends portrait, landscape, and installation with the post-cinematic medium of 3D simulation. His computer-generated simulations exist outside ‘time-based media,’ using real-time computer graphics to create virtual and alternate worlds. While studying for his BFA at Oxford University, he experimented with 3D scanning as sculptural photography. Gerrard is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Trinity College, Dublin. In 2002, he was awarded the Pépinières Residency at Ars Electronica, Linz, where he developed his first works in 3D real-time computer graphics. His work explores contemporary power structures, human expansion, and pivotal moments in the Industrial Age, merging portrait, landscape, and history painting with the Unigine 3D engine as a medium. Each work operates from an algorithm and set of conditions, generating imagery in the virtual world. His eerily hyperreal melancholic realms have a physical presence when installed as large-scale projections or ‘artboxes’ designed in collaboration with an industrial design firm in Vienna.

Judy Chicago, Women and Smoke, California, 1971–1972. Single-channel digital video, transferred from 16mm film

This video documents a series of performances that Judy Chicago choreographed in the California landscape. Combining colorful bodies and smoke bombs to create paintings that are no longer confined by a canvas or frame, the scenes conjure the power and mystery of ancient goddess rituals, an important reference for feminist artists who wanted to reclaim a male-dominated history of art.

JUDY CHICAGO (b. 1939, Chicago, IL) is a contemporary feminist artist, art educator, and writer with work spanning installation, painting, and sculpture. Her work involves a variety of media, from needlework and welding to pyrotechnics, and often focuses on birth and creation imagery, examining the role of women in history and culture. She is best known for The Dinner Party, a sprawling installation that combines traditional women’s craft of embroidery, needlepoint, and ceramics and took five years to complete. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of California, graduating with an MFA in 1964. In 1970, she created the Feminist Art Program at California State University, then co-founded another at California Institute of the Arts the following year. In 1999, she received the UCLA Alumni Professional Achievement Award and was awarded honorary degrees from Lehigh University, Smith College, Duke University, and Russell Sage College. She collaborates with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, and is represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery.

12 Michal Rovner, Blue Hills, 2018. Single-channel digital video, custom monitor

In Blue Hills, lines of people move across a flat but harsh-looking terrain. The individuals progress, but the lines, the grouping of people as one follows another, are endless. Represented in silhouette in a seamlessly looping scene, the walking figures have no individualizing features; their identities have been obscured or erased. Their movements can only speak to collective human behavior or desire, perhaps the need to feel belonging and connection both to a landscape and to one another.

MICHAL ROVNER (b. 1957, Ramat Gan, Israel) is an Israeli contemporary artist with work spanning video, photo, drawing, and film. She uses time-based media to explore the social histories of landscape. In her work, she presents situations of conflict and fractures, then distorts, extracts, and abstracts aspects of reality and transforms the subject. Her work is shown internationally, including at the Louvre, the Whitney, the Metropolitan, SFMOMA, MCA Chicago, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

13 Carla Gannis, The Garden of Emoji Delights, 2014.

Single-channel 4K video, 5:36 min.

The Garden of Emoji Delights is a digital remake of a Renaissance masterpiece with a new message for our digital era. Famously illustrating the gruesome punishment of people in Hell who lived erotic instead of spiritual lives—a central dogma of Christian belief —Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510) is here emulated at exactly half the scale of the original oil painting with a new cast of characters: emojis, the small icons invented in Japan in 1999 that pervade today’s casual electronic communication.

In this triptych, the left panel shows the Christian God introducing Eve to Adam, the parents of all humankind. The middle panel depicts a pleasure garden where bodily temptations distract from God’s rule, and the right panel reveals the consequences— torture by monsters in the afterlife.

CARLA GANNIS (b. 1970, Durham, NY) is a contemporary, interdisciplinary, and digital artist. She formerly worked as a userinterface designer for technology companies to create application icons. Since 2003, her digital and virtual artworks have become a cornerstone of the “Internet Gothic,” a genre that builds on Southern Gothic in American art and literature and celebrates the horror and humor of modern existence. Her work explores power, sexuality, and storytelling, combining digital imagery and animation with notable historical works such as paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Gannis received a BFA in painting from the University of North Carolina Greensboro and an MFA at Boston University. She is the Industry Professor at New York University (NYU) in the Integrated Digital Media Program, Department of Technology, Culture and Society, Tandon School of Engineering.

14 Penelope Umbrico, 48,586,054 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (Partial) 11/05/20, 2020. 1,440 chromogenic machine prints

Suns from Sunsets from Flickr began in 2006 when artist Penelope Umbrico set out to find the most photographed subject on the internet. Searching the photo-sharing website Flickr for images tagged as sunsets, Umbrico isolated the suns in thousands of images uploaded by unknown photographers. The title for each iteration in the series reflects the growing number of results returned by the search process, while the title’s parenthetical points out that the physical installation is only capable of showcasing a fragment of the total number of sunsets on Flickr’s servers. Due to the rate of photos being uploaded, the titular number only lasts an instant, making this record analogous to the act of photographing the sunset itself.

PENELOPE

UMBRICO (b. 1957, Philadelphia, PA) is an American artist known for collecting found images on the internet to portray digital society in a global, collective spirit. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and received her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts MFA Photography Video and Related Media in NYC and the former chair of MFA Photography at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She has received numerous awards, and her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Foto Colectania, the Photographers’ Gallery, and the Pingyao International Photography Festival.

15 Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds, 2002.

Handmade hacked Super Mario Brothers cartridge, Nintendo NES video game system

Super Mario Clouds plays an altered version of the well-known 1985 video game Super Mario Bros. The artist hacked and then rewrote the game’s software code, erasing all sounds and visual imagery save for the iconic clouds rolling against a serene blue background. The video is considered a masterwork in the genre of digital art, as Arcangel elevated software hacking to high art, paving the way for generations of rebellious artists to confront and change the proprietary digital products that pervade our lives.

The work was first created not for gallery display but for presentation and, hopefully, viral status on the internet. Arcangel, who considers computers and video game consoles the tools of his art, has always been more interested in sharing his process than the final aesthetic outcome.

CORY ARCANGEL (b. 1978, Buffalo, NY) is a leading contemporary artist whose work spans drawing, music, video, performance art, and video game hacking. Best known for his video game modifications, his work explores the intersection of digital technology and pop culture. At the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, he studied classical guitar, music technology, and coding. In 2000, he co-founded the Beige Programming Ensemble to release experimental Internet art and music. Arcangel began showing his artwork at galleries in Münich and Chicago in 2001. In 2011, he became the youngest artist since Bruce Nauman to have a largescale solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

16 Ragnar Kjartansson, The Boat (Stephan Stephensen, Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir and Gyða Valtýsdóttir), 2015. Single-channel digital video, 2:36 hours

The Boat is a two-and-a-half-hour scene of a woman and man docking a motorboat, disembarking, embracing in a kiss, and then parting ways. The sequence proceeds in real-time and is repeated consecutively dozens of times by the same actors. The Boat is part of Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel video artwork Scenes from Western Culture, which documents mundane moments from affluent lifestyles. Together, the vignettes are a sympathetic satire of “the good life,” displayed on nine wall-mounted TV monitors in a gallery like an exhibition of Old Master paintings.

RAGNAR KJARTANSSON (b. 1976, Iceland) creates video installations, performances, drawings, and paintings that blend historical and cultural references. He blurs the distinctions between mediums, likening his films to paintings and performances to sculpture. He explores beauty and its banality through durational, repetitive performance, with underlying connections of pathos and irony influenced by classical theater’s comedy and tragedy. Major solo shows include exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reykjavík Art Museum, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. Kjartansson represented Iceland at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and participated in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th in 2013.

17 Michael Bell-Smith, Up and Away, 2006. Single-channel video with sound, 6:40 min.

Up and Away leads viewers on a journey through a succession of two-dimensional landscapes, some natural, some man-made, clipped from video game backgrounds and other digital sources. Skylines, deserts, mountains, castles, oceanscapes, and clouds—both the familiar and the fantastical—scroll past on the screen in a seemingly endless animation. The result is a spectacular confusion of foreground and background perception that creates a dizzying yet alluring fantasy of travel, place, and nature. The work raises questions about our eager acceptance of digital technology, both its representation of space and its manipulation of our senses.

MICHAEL BELL-SMITH (b. 1978, East Corinth, ME) is a conceptual visual and digital animation artist, Professor and Chair of New Media at Purchase College, and Moving Image Co-Chair at Bard MFA. He blends visual elements from popular culture and spaces, including video games, advertising, and interiors, and places them in unexpected frameworks. His dozens of short-loop video digital animations merge computer-generated imagery with physical experience and document the changing history of viral content. Bell-Smith’s works have been shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, SFMOMA, Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, and Tate Liverpool.

18 teamLab, The World of Irreversible Change, 2022. Six-channel interactive digital work with sound

The World of Irreversible Change is a real-time interactive artwork that depicts the activities of digital citizens in a virtual city. Viewers can touch and disturb the figures to alter their social behaviors. When provoked with touching, the figures become increasingly agitated. Over time, the accumulated aggression can break out into war among the figures, resulting in the total annihilation of their population, their homes, and their land. After months pass in this virtual domain, the world begins to regrow. The seasons colorfully change, and the sun rises and sets in accordance with the actual time and day of the location in which the work is installed.

TEAMLAB (formed 2001, Tokyo) is an international art collection of artists, architects, CG animators, designers, engineers, programmers, and self-described “ultra-technologists.” The collective was founded by Toshiyuku Inoko and Shunsuke Aoki in 1998 and officially formed in 2001. The group uses digital technology to create art that explores the relationship between nature and artificial creations, immersing viewers in interactive, borderless worlds. In 2011, the collective debuted work at the Singapore Biennale and, in 2015, organized a solo exhibition in Tokyo. They have many permanent exhibitions and installations across the globe, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the National Gallery of Victoria, and Amos Rex.

19 Elias Sime, Tightrope, 2022. Reclaimed electrical wires, circuit boards, nails on panel

For this work and series, Sime uses computer motherboards, keyboards, electrical wires, and other found objects dumped by developed countries in the West. The artist transforms these byproducts of global economic development into abstract art, with layers of color, texture, and eccentric contours that suggest topography or some yet-to-be-resolved representational composition. As found technology and as repurposed trash, the works in the Tightrope series are a commentary on the global exchange of values across economic, technological, and cultural systems.

20 Petra Cortright, green hill green light esprit de corps, 2023. Single-channel digital video

Over the course of seventeen minutes, green hill green light esprit de corps depicts an endlessly mutating computergenerated landscape. Slow, infinitesimally small movements populate an isolated hill with sprouting shrubs and flowers nurtured by gentle rain showers. This surreal panorama is in constant motion: rhythmic scans from a worm’s eye perspective track across the verdant expanse of ground and give way to suspended plant life as the earth becomes a plasticine sky. Our perspective seamlessly glides both above and below the surface of a composition that is at once ethereal and unsettling.

PETRA CORTRIGHT (b. 1986, Santa Barbara, CA) is a postInternet, digital media, and video artist. She emerged as an Internet artist in 2007, uploading self-portrait video artworks to YouTube, then transitioned into software-based digital collages and paintings. These collages blend figurative and abstract elements, exploring the formal properties of video software and the representation of physical bodies in digital spaces. The titles reflect file names, extensions, and search terms used to source found imagery. From the digital paintings, she selects scenes to print on unique substrate materials, including fabrics, aluminum, paper, and linen, using paint and industrial print processes.

21 teamLab, Life Survives by the Power of Life II, 2020.

Single-channel 8K digital work

In this artwork, the character that signifies life, 生 (sei), is written three-dimensionally using what teamLab refers to as Spatial Calligraphy. Spatial Calligraphy is a form of calligraphy drawn in space that teamLab has been exploring since the collective was founded in 2001. The work reconstructs calligraphy in threedimensional space to express the brush stroke’s depth, speed, and power. The result is then flattened into two dimensions. Taking a cue from the spatial perception of premodern East Asian paintings, teamLab constructs a logical structure of spatial recognition different from that of a lens in which the screen does not become a boundary, and the viewpoint is not fixed. teamLab named this logical structure Ultrasubjective Space, in which the artwork is perceived as though it exists in a real, three-dimensional space beyond the display surface. The artwork slowly unfolds through the four seasons over the course of an hour, with each season slowly morphing and changing into the next .

22 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Shadow Tuner, 2024.

Spherical LED display, depth cameras, speakers, powder-coated stainless steel base, custom software, power distributor, sound card, video controller, computers

An animated image of the Earth slowly rotates on a sphere of LEDs. As the shadows of viewers project onto the earth’s surface and pass over different cities, they automatically trigger streams of live local radio stations from those locations. Like the artist’s 2003 work Frequency and Volume, the visitor’s body becomes an antenna or tuning dial, scanning for sound signals. The software includes an AI analyzer that prioritizes spoken word over music; thus, the work becomes a polyphony of world language diversity.

RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER

(b. 1967, Mexico City) is internationally renowned for his thoughtful use of software, custom coding, and digital displays to create poetic work that is as meaningful as it is engaging. His interactive installations link architecture, computerized surveillance, and public participation to evoke enlightenment, spirituality, and a consideration of some of our time’s most important socio-political issues. He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the 52nd Venice Biennale and has received two BAFTA awards for Interactive Art. His public art has been commissioned by Mexico City, the Vancouver Olympics, and the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. Collections holding his work include MoMA and Guggenheim in New York, Tate in London, MAC and MBAM in Montreal, Jumex, and MUAC in Mexico City, DAROS in Zurich, MONA in Hobart, 21C Museum in Kanazawa, Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, CIFO in Miami, MAG in Manchester, SFMOMA in San Francisco, ZKM in Karlsruhe, SAM in Singapore and many others.

23 Terry Adkins, Miy Paluk 1866, 2012. Single-channel video with sound, 24:26 min.

In this video work, Terry Adkins assumes the role of Matthew Henson, the first African American Arctic explorer. Adkins’ themes are often communicated across mediums—this work connects to other videos and series of drawings and silkscreens investigating the lives of historical African American figures.

TERRY ADKINS (b. 1953, Washington, D.C.; d. 2014, Brooklyn, NY) was an interdisciplinary American artist whose work spanned performance, photography, sculpture, and video. Initially, he planned to follow in the footsteps of family members and become a musician. However, he was ultimately drawn to visual art in college, studying printmaking at Fisk University and completing master’s programs at Illinois State University and the University of Kentucky. Adkins’ “recital” installations and exhibitions were often inspired by or dedicated to musicians and musical instruments. He also focused on the biographies and obscure details of overlooked and seminal historical figures. In 2008 and 2009, he was awarded the USA Fellowship and Rome Prize. At the University of Pennsylvania, he was a professor of fine arts and mentor to many contemporary visual artists. Adkins’ works have been exhibited at many museums and galleries, including the Whitney, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metropolitan and MoMA in New York, and the Tate Modern.

Bruce Conner, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, 1959–67. Two single-channel digital videos, transferred from 16mm film, 2:43 min./14:28 min.

Edited from hundreds of original shots taken in Mexico City, this film documents the Conner family’s time living in Mexico from 1961–62. Part of this time was spent roaming the rural hillsides looking for “magic” mushrooms, occasionally accompanied by Timothy Leary. The film expresses the mind-bending, sometimes hallucinatory consciousness of the 1960s. Conner made the film sequence after a pivotal life decision to relocate his family to Mexico, away from US politics and war. Looking for Mushrooms reflects a spiritual and material quest for freedom .

Conner experimented with multiple-exposure sequences and repeated frames, ultimately creating two versions of the film. The shorter version includes a soundtrack by the Beatles, and the 14 minute version features the work of experimental composer Terry Riley.

BRUCE CONNER (b. 1933, McPherson, KS; d. 2008, San Francisco, CA) was an American multimedia artist with work that ran the gamut from assemblage and film to drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography. His films and sculpture installations influenced generations of artists, including director Dennis Hopper. Conner emerged among the Beat movement in San Francisco in the late 1950s and created over twenty art films using experimental filmmaking techniques such as cut-up collage and sampling that depicted an altered view of reality. Conner’s work is widely celebrated in museums and cinemas alike.

25 Spencer Finch, Fire (After Joseph Wright of Derby), 2009. Laminated color filters and lightbox

Fire (After Joseph Wright of Derby) considers the long collaboration and mutual fascination of the arts and sciences. During the Enlightenment, light was a key metaphor for artists, and painters such as Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) used this visual element to great effect. Finch’s homage to Wright of Derby and to the pursuits of Enlightenment artists and scientists compares our contemporary digital revolution to the eighteenthcentury scientific revolution. The artist borrowed a palette of colored pixels from a Wright of Derby painting that depicted scientists experimenting with fire and extended those pixels into color bands atop a lightbox. A dimmer on the lightbox’s side allows for viewer interaction.

SPENCER FINCH (b. 1962, New Haven, CT) is a leading contemporary artist whose electronic light sculptures and perceptual abstractions consider the elusive concepts of memory and perception. His works include special, site-specific commissions in a variety of mediums involving watercolor, photography, glass, electronics, video, and fluorescent lights. He uses a colorimeter to measure the light that exists naturally in a specific time and place, then reconstructs the luminosity of the readings with fluorescent installations. He studied at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, received a BA in Comparative Literature at Hamilton College, and an MFA in Sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design. Finch was the only artist chosen to create a commission for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning, in which he hand-painted 2,983 squares of paper, each in a unique shade of blue for every person killed in the attacks on September 11 and in the 1993 bombing.

Allison Janae Hamilton, Wacissa, 2019. Singlechannel digital video with sound, 22:14 min.

Wacissa was created by dragging a video camera underwater from the artist’s kayak as she traveled on the Wacissa River in Florida. Hamilton wanted to see beneath the river’s surface because of the waterway’s nickname, the Slave Canal, so-called for the enslaved workers who dug miles of channels in the 1800s for the benefit of the logging and cotton industries.

Landscape is the lens through which the artist can investigate the past and the present: the river is simultaneously the focal point of a terrible cultural legacy and the site of current environmental threats. In related works, Hamilton places herself in this same landscape, the river, in an effort to personalize and make the immediate connection between people and land.

ALLISON JANAE HAMILTON

(b. 1984, Lexington, KY) is a contemporary artist with work spanning photography, immersive installations, monumental outdoor sculpture, and video. Hamilton’s artwork features the landscape of Northern Florida and Western Tennessee, the locations of her upbringing and family ties, as her “central protagonist” with plant imagery, sounds, and found objects. Blending the folklore of the American South with personal family narratives, she confronts the region’s layered history of labor, spirituality, and epic mythos to address current social and political concerns. She has an MFA in visual arts from Columbia University, a PhD in American studies from New York University, an MA in African American studies from Columbia University, and two BS degrees from Florida State University.

27 Matt Mullican, Untitled (Animated Cosmology, Overall Heavens, 9 Panels), 2005. Single-channel digital video, 13 sec.

Untitled (Animated Cosmology, Overall Heavens, 9 Panels) is a seamlessly looping animation of a system of shapes that are intended to represent aspects of the artist’s life history, including his birth and the growth of his soul. Like many artists who use their own body as a principal subject of scrutiny, Matt Mullican’s investigations of his own psyche across a diverse range of mediums, 2D and 3D, as well as time-based, serve as the ongoing inspiration for his work. Among other sources, Mullican uses the coded languages of road signs, flags, and diagrams to make visual order of his personal universe, crafting what he calls his “cosmology.”

MATT MULLICAN (b. 1951, Santa Monica, CA) is an American artist and educator who has been exhibiting his artwork since the early 1970s. He is known as one of the first artists to crossover the conceptual aspects of computer-aided imaging and digital animation for contemporary art audiences. His work uses knowledge, meaning, and language systems to explore the connection between perception and reality. Much of Mullican’s artwork visualizes the inner mysteries of his mind through a universal language of geometry. He received a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1974 and has taught at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, Columbia University, the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, the London Institute, and the Chelsea College of Art and Design.

28 Bruce Nauman, Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor), 1999. Single-channel standard-definition video, 59:30 min.

In Setting a Good Corner, Bruce Nauman filmed himself erecting a fence post on his Las Madres Ranch in New Mexico. The work proceeds in real time, unedited, over the course of an hour until the job is complete. Nauman works without speaking, digging holes, securing the foundation, setting tension wires, and being visited by his wife and dogs. The artist performs his labor— literally exposing the work of the artwork—as a metaphor for disciplined living.

Since the 1960s, Nauman has worked at the forefront of mediabased art and turned his attention to the duties of his ranch for projects. Ranchers will be able to identify the expertise required for Nauman’s task. Much like so many landscape painters throughout history, Nauman demonstrates the assumption of mastery that humans attempt to assert over land, enacting a tug-of-war between humans and nature.

BRUCE NAUMAN (b. 1941, Fort Wayne, IN) is an American artist with work spanning sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. He studied math and physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and art at the University of California. After graduating in 1966, he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California at Irvine. His first video artworks achieved critical acclaim in 1968. In 1979, Nauman relocated his art studio to a ranch in New Mexico and started to create works about the natural environment. He holds honorary doctorates from the San Francisco Art Institute and the California Institute of the Arts and numerous awards. His work is in many private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim, the MoMA, MCA Chicago, the Tate Modern, and Kunstmuseum Basel.

29 Paul Ramírez Jonas, Another Day, 2003. PBASIC code output to NTSC video signal, custom microcontroller, three monitors

Another Day presents an endless scroll of data across three displays, imitating the arrival and departure screens at airports and train stations. The screens collectively display an animated countdown to the next sunrise in ninety international cities organized by longitude, with twenty-seven cities displayed at any given time. Anticipating the moment that the sun crosses the horizon, the artwork changes continuously, reflecting seasonal variances, including the perpetual day and night experienced by cities located in the Arctic Circle during the height of summer and the depth of winter.

By tracking the westward movement that characterizes colonial “discovery,” Another Day builds on Ramírez Jonas’s artistic explorations into the historical relationship between technological innovation and geographic exploration. Yet, it also relies on the very straightforward and universal passage of time.

PAUL RAMÍREZ JONAS (b. 1965, Pomona, CA) is an American artist and arts educator. He is world-renowned for his public art installations that explore how Latino identity has changed in the era of globalized information. Born in California, Ramírez Jonas grew up in Honduras and relocated back to the US for school. He graduated with a BA in studio art from Brown University and an MFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Since 1990, he has exhibited in prominent art museums and international biennials, including the Metropolitan, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Guggenheim. He was an Associate Professor at Hunter College and is currently the Chair of the Art Department and a professor at Cornell University.

Pioneering electronic artist Woody Vasulka found a discarded electric circuit board near the atomic weapons laboratories and grounds at Los Alamos and turned it into art. He buried the circuit board in his yard, allowing nature, insects, and mice to alter its surface, and later scanned the board and printed the resulting image as a large-scale abstract composition. Vasulka’s work in video and other technology-based mediums often addresses the evolution of these mediums relative to one another and to their cultural context. Here, Glass—Lucifer’s Commission serves as a commentary on the endurance of creativity and life during times of anxiety, war, and destruction.

WOODY

VASULKA (b. 1937, Brno, Czechoslovakia; d. 2019, Santa Fe, NM) and his wife, Steina, were early pioneers of video art. Since the 1960s, they have produced experimental work using images, videotapes, computer graphics, and television program video effects. The Vasulkas developed tools to manipulate electronic signals into cutting-edge audio and visual artworks. Woody first trained as an engineer, then moved to Prague to study television and film production at the Academy of Performing Arts, where he met Steina. They began collaborating and married in 1964. After moving to New York, the couple founded the influential non-profit art space The Kitchen, a media theater in the kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center in the Grand Central Hotel that became an inclusive and welcoming space for music, performance, and media artists.

31 Richard Anuszkiewicz, Lino Sunset, 1969.

RICHARD ANUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1930 in Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2020) began painting non-objectively in 1955, applying notions of color theory and abstraction that he had learned while studying under Josef Albers at Yale University. In 1965, Anuszkiewicz adopted his trademark style, creating precise lines using masking tape and thick layers of acrylic paint. Lino Sunset features a series of thirty-two groupings of hard-edge vertical lines in red, orange, and yellow over a ground that transitions from periwinkle blue into yellow-green.

One of the fathers of American Optical Art, Anuszkiewicz emphasizes color as an emotive tool, differing from the movement’s South American and European factions. Mathematical in form, his best-known works are atmospheric, boundless, and psychologically responsive. Instead of focusing solely on color studies or geometric arrangements, Anuszkiewicz imbued human elements into his compositions through rich color and the sociological and spiritual “drama” within. He frequently employed nesting squares, reflecting the influence of his mentor, Josef Albers. The son of Polish immigrants, Anuszkiewicz studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Yale University, where he earned his MFA under Albers. At Yale, he was roommates with Julian Stanczak, a fellow Polish-born abstract painter and student of Albers. His work has been featured at the Florence and Venice Biennales and is part of notable permanent collections, including the MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum.

32 Karl Benjamin, Laguna Seascape II, 1954. Oil on canvas

The Hard-Edge movement was an approach to abstract painting that employed meticulously defined lines, contours, and areas of color. In 1959, a groundbreaking show in Los Angeles featured Karl Benjamin’s work and coined the term. His transitional works from the mid-1950s, like Laguna Seascape II, are still recognizably representational. The colors and textures evoke the natural landscape rather than a theoretical interplay of tones and forms.

KARL BENJAMIN (b. 1925 in Chicago, d. 2012 in Claremont) was an American painter, art educator, and professor. He rose to fame as one of the “Four Abstract Classicists” in Los Angeles, producing critically acclaimed work that explores color relationships, hard-edge shapes, and vibrant geometric compositions. After dropping out of Northwestern University to serve in the US Navy during World War II, Benjamin returned to school with the GI Bill at the University of Redlands, studying literature, history, and philosophy. In 1949, Benjamin married Beverly Jean Paschke and became an elementary and middle school teacher, developing art lessons and curriculum that sparked a keen interest in painting. He enrolled in classes at the Claremont Graduate School and earned an MA in 1960. During that time, Benjamin held his first solo exhibition in 1954 at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon) and was featured in the “Four Abstract Classicists” at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMoMA) from 1959 to 1960. He won National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1983 and 1989, and his artwork is included in many prestigious museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

33 Ellsworth Kelly, Dark Blue Panel, 1981–82.

Painted aluminum

Ellsworth Kelly’s Dark Blue Panel may be the antithesis of traditional landscape painting. Alongside a generation of midcentury abstract painters, Kelly was searching for a way to retreat from representation and the long-standing proposition that a painting was a picture frame that situated the viewer in relationship to some scene. The components of Dark Blue Panel—a single flat area of unmediated color and a shaped canvas that rejects the ubiquitous rectangle that had defined visual presentation since the time of the Greeks—allowed Kelly to transform the fundamental nature of the two-dimensional figure versus ground supposition. The painting is no longer a painting of something. Instead, it is a sculpture, a construct of paint and canvas that exists in the same three-dimensional space as the viewer.

ELLSWORTH

KELLY (b. 1923 in Newburgh, New York, d. 2015) was an American sculptor, printmaker, and painter known for his Minimalist, Hard-Edge, and Color field works. Growing up near the Oradell Reservoir, Kelly’s grandmother introduced him to bird watching at an early age. John James Audubon and ornithology became strong influences, with Kelly emphasizing line, bright color, and form in his work. Author Eugene Goossen speculated that Kelly’s study of two- and three-color birds inspired his iconic two- and three-color paintings. Kelly studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn until 1943, when he was inducted into the Army. He requested assignment to the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion, and there he served with other artists, designers, and creative thinkers in the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops “Ghost Army.” After the war and with the help of the GI Bill, Kelly returned to school and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, from 1946–47, then later in Paris. Kelly taught art classes at the Norfolk House Center, had exhibitions in Boston and New York City, participated in a group show at the Whitney, and later moved to Spencertown with his partner, photographer Jack Shear.

34 Helen Lundeberg, The Blue Planet, 1962. Oil on canvas

Helen Lundeberg transitioned between painting styles several times during her six-decade career, from figuration to abstraction and back to representational work. Her exploration of different themes and approaches unfolded with method and grace, and she revisited specific image motifs many times. The planets were one such topic of fascination—entities she found both mysterious and familiar.

HELEN LUNDEBERG (b. 1908 in Chicago, d. 1999) was an American painter who founded Post-Surrealism, first known as Subjective Classism, with her husband, Lorser Feitelson. As a young adult, she first pursued becoming a writer, but after taking a class at the Stickney Memorial School of Art, she shifted to painting. There, she met Feitelson, a professor and fellow painter. Many of her early works were portraits of herself, her mother, and her sister. In 1931, she first exhibited at the Fine Arts Gallery in San Diego and, in 1933, at the Stanley Rose Gallery in Los Angeles for her first solo show. Later, she made lithographs, easel paintings, and murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project in Los Angeles and Southern California. In the 1950s, her work reformed into geometric abstraction and Hard Edge, with paintings existing in the space between abstraction and figuration. Then, in the 1960s and 70s, her work shifted further into abstracted landscapes, interiors, and planetary forms with lyrical compositions and restricted colors.

35 Lee Mullican, World, 1962. Oil on canvas

World could be considered a classically abstract painting, one in which the formal features are minimalist or nearly void of detail, but the meaning is as complex and robust as any representational work. As a simple geometrical figure, World is unthreatening, even serene—a single view of an uncomplicated world. Nevertheless, it is a powerful image that allows viewers to imagine any number of alternative landscapes.

LEE MULLICAN (b. 1919 in Chickasha, OK, d. 1998 in Los Angeles, CA) was an American abstract painter, curator, and art teacher. After graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute, he was drafted into the Army during World War II and stationed in Hawaii. In 1946, he moved to San Francisco and became an influential member of the Dynaton Movement. The Surrealism-influenced movement began as a group exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1951. Mullican was joined by his friends and fellow artists Gordon Onslow Ford, a British painter, and Wolfgang Paalen, an Austrian Mexican painter and sculptor. In 1959, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and later, in 1961, joined UCLA’s Art Department. Mullican married the feminist artist and painter Luchita Hurtado and had two sons, John and Matt. Mullican is known for his abstract, rigid, and linear painting techniques with a palette knife and cosmology influences that often appear in other Dynaton works and are continued in his son Matt’s digital works. Mullican’s work is in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

36 Roland Petersen, Fall Cloud Shadow and Fields, 1972. Acrylic on canvas

In Fall Cloud Shadow and Fields, employing the manipulation of one-point perspective, the artist convinces the viewer to interpret the image on the picture plane as three-dimensional and receding in space. The painting also relies on a scheme of figure and ground oppositions, or the “push-pull” technique Petersen learned while studying with Hans Hoffman. The interaction of dark and light elements creates movement and tension in the composition, allowing the viewer to envision what the title promises: shadows and sunlight illuminating fields. Though formally more abstract and less painterly than many of Petersen’s works during this period, the painting resembles a classic landscape view with its near and far elements.

ROLAND PETERSEN (b. 1926 in Endelave, Denmark) is a Danishborn American painter, printmaker, and professor. He was part of the “Bridge Generation” and the Bay Area Figurative Movement, which saw a rejection of Abstract Expressionism and a return to figuration in painting during the 1950s and 1960s. He received both a BA and an MA at UC Berkeley, where he studied under Chiura Obata, John Haley, and Glen Wessels. He continued studies at the California School of Fine Arts, the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, California College of Arts and Crafts, and Atelier 17. From 1956 to 1992, he taught painting at Washington State University and painting and printmaking at the University of California until 1991. He is known for his use of saturated colors, layers of paint, geometric compositions, and still-life arrangements. His paintings are exhibited in the permanent collections of the Davis Arts Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Monterey Museum of Art, the De Young Museum, and the MoMA among many others.

37 Emilio Pettoruti, Lumiére Méditerranéene, 1958–59. Oil on canvas

Emilio Pettoruti addressed issues of space and composition in his works. He was preoccupied with light, color, and movement to a point where, according to one critic, his work was “near scientific in its severity.” Paradoxically, he was also a romantic, as one can sense from the title of Lumiére Méditerranéene, the French a deliberate touch. The interplay of yellow and blue evokes the colors of a Mediterranean landscape, as sunlight and water compete for one’s attention and vie for dominance in the composition. The result is a work that, though abstract, represents not just a landscape but the sensory and emotional experience of humans immersed in it.

EMILIO PETTORUTI (b. 1892 in La Plata, Argentina, d. 1971 in Paris, France) was an Argentine painter influenced by many artistic movements including Cubism, Futurism, and Abstraction, and famous for his controversial avant-garde cubist exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1924. From a young age, he showed artistic talent and studied briefly at the local Academy of Fine Arts at age fourteen before dropping out to pursue independent studies. At the Drawing School in the Museum of Natural History, he studied with architect Emilio Coutaret and developed a style of caricature portraits. In 1913, he received a scholarship to study abroad in Italy, studied Renaissance painters in Florence, and met other avant-garde and Futurist artists. He returned to Argentina in 1924 for his Buenos Aires exhibition and became a prominent figure as the director of the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes in La Plata. He exhibited work throughout Argentina, the US, and Europe, and has paintings featured in the Museo Provincial and Malba Museo de Arte de Buenos Aires collections.

38 Jordan Nassar, Through the Window, 2022. Cotton, plain weave; embroidered with cotton in cross-stitches

In Through The Window, Jordan Nassar uses traditional motifs of Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery to create repeating geometric patterns that are then composed into an abstract landscape. This scene’s idealized or illusionary nature, some assembled with areas of purely geometric patterns, emerges from his distanced relationship to his ancestral country.

JORDAN NASSAR (b. 1985 in New York, NY) is an American contemporary visual artist known for his collaborative embroidery and textile work with Palestinian artisans. His identity as a diaspora Palestinian living in a Western culture heavily influences his works, which envision utopian landscapes and imagined spaces as embroidered and cross-stitched textile paintings. Nassar begins each piece with a composition and then sends them to female weavers in the West Bank. There, the women select colors and stitch the patterns, with Nassar finally completing the piece with landscapes. His works recontextualize and merge Palestinian traditions with Western art and his own while honoring the stitchwork craft. Nassar is inspired by Lebanese artist and poet Etel Adnan, who also features landscape in her work. Nassar has work in many permanent collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, the Rollins Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

39 Fritz Scholder, Arizona #3, 1982. Acrylic on canvas

In the 1960s, influenced by the work of artists like Wayne Thiebaud, with whom he studied, and by the West Coast abstraction he observed during art school in Sacramento in the 1950s, Scholder began making landscape-inspired compositions such as Arizona #3. With its vibrantly colored horizontal bands, organizing the view into distances near and far, the work resembles the Ocean Park landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn and the work of color field painters.

FRITZ SCHOLDER (b. 1937 in Breckenridge, MN, d. 2005 in Scottsdale, AZ) was a prominent American artist and enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians. His high school art teacher was Oscar Howe, a Yanktonai Dakota artist, and he studied with Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma. Known for his impactful paintings, lithographs, and sculptures, Scholder’s work was characterized by postmodern and Pop Art influences and aimed to deconstruct stereotypes of American Indians. He received his formal arts education from Wisconsin State University and Sacramento State University. He taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts and influenced a generation of Native American artists. In 2009, he was posthumously inducted into the California Hall of Fame. His works have been featured in numerous retrospectives and traveling exhibitions, including the National Museum of the American Indian’s two-venue retrospective Indian/Not Indian in Washington, DC, and New York.

40 Karen Kitchel, American Grasslands, 1997–98. Six oils on panel

Karen Kitchel’s American Grasslands series offers a stark and deliberate alternative to traditional views of the land. From a series that has grown to more than a hundred paintings, this arrangement of six depicts a collection of native and invasive plants within American native landscapes where grass is the naturally dominant vegetation. They closely represent cropped flora from these temperate grasslands: precisely three pastures, two prairies, and one lawn.

KAREN KITCHEL (b. 1957 in Battle Creek, Michigan) is an American Modern landscape painter who lives and works in Venture, California. Her work extends landscape practices into the modern world, with themes of agriculture, the horizon, regional botany, invasive plant species, and compromised waterways. Her unconventional choices of subject matter, material, and form bring a new perspective to the traditional practices of landscape painting. Her hand-crafted paintings of land-based imagery vary in media and substrates: oils, asphalt emulsion, tar, wax, shellac, powdered mineral pigments, painted canvas, panel, and burlap in varying sizes. She received a BA from Kalamazoo College in 1979 and an MFA in Painting from Claremont Graduate University in 1982. She is featured in numerous exhibitions and collections, including the Denver Art Museum, the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Joslyn Art Museum, the Nicolaysen Art Museum, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the Tucson Museum of Art, and the US State Department.

41 Georgia O’Keeffe, Road Past the View, 1964. Oil on canvas

Road Past the View is an example of O’Keeffe’s vast catalog of paintings inspired by the scenery and architecture near her two homes in northern New Mexico, as well as a documentation of a particular view encountered while driving between them in 1964. She captures the contours of the mesa, the valley, and the road with minimalist, nearly abstract gestures, evoking the light and the clear, vast distance typical of vistas in the western US. Like so many of her near-abstract works, Road Past the View has a stillness to its forms and colors that speak to the effect the land had on her, the sheer monumentality of scale that the artist called “the faraway.”

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (b. 1887 in Sun Prairie, WI, d. 1986 in Santa Fe, NM) was a prominent American painter and pioneer of Modernism. Mostly independent of major art movements, she is famous for her paintings of the Southwestern landscape, flowers, animal remains, and modern architecture. Over time, her paintings gradually shifted from realism to abstract compositions. Among many prestigious schools, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Students League in New York, and the Teachers College at Columbia University. After marrying and living with photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York, O’Keeffe began to spend time in New Mexico and the Southwest. The landscape and natural forms of the Southwest heavily influenced her work for the rest of her life, and she moved to New Mexico permanently after Stieglitz’s death, occupying both her home studio and famous Ghost Ranch summer home in Abiquiú. She spent the last years of her life in Santa Fe, where the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum was established following her passing. O’Keeffe received the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1972, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, and the National Medal of Arts in 1985. She produced thousands of paintings across a seven-decade career, and many museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney, MoMA, the Metropolitan, and MFA Boston, feature her works.

42 Muzae Sesay, Bonding Hour Balcony, 2023. Oil, oil pastel, vinyl emulsion, and colored pencil on canvas

Bonding Hour Balcony is an abstract representation of the balcony at Sesay’s California home. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this space became an essential and safe place for connection and friendship. Though the space depicted is highly compacted, the architectural details are readable, and the bright red coloring, typical of his recent paintings, evokes a lively, even festive environment rather than one of intense concern or fear.

MUZAE SESAY (b. 1989 in Long Beach, CA) is an Oakland-based American artist and painter. His work explores environments and spaces, delving into themes of community, urbanization, and home. Sesay’s paintings present vivid, abstract, and geometric compositions with energetic colors. He has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including “Cut Trees” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tiwani Contemporary in London, Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles, Eighteen Gallery in Copenhagen. His paintings are in many museum collections, including SFMoMA, the Svane Family Foundation, the de Young Museum, and the North Dakota Museum of Art.

43 Carlos Rojas, Untitled, 1976. Mixed media on canvas

An exceptional and complex work from Rojas’ Horizontes series, this work presents a progression of painted horizontal lines that represent the horizon: the foreground, the background, and every band in between. In this way, Rojas captures the structural essence of the natural landscape while compressing its depth into a single, flat plane, giving the sensation of simultaneously apprehending each component of our physical environment.

CARLOS ROJAS (b. 1933 in Facatativá, Colombia, d. 1997 in Bogotá) was a principal figure of abstract art in Colombia, defining the course of abstract art in Latin America with his paintings that defy simple categorization. He studied Architecture and Fine Arts in Bogotá and Rome before shifting to painting. Rojas described his artistic pursuit as articulating the geometric basis of the world, which connected to his understanding of spirituality and the divine. He is known for his use of contrasting colors and architectural space, drawing inspiration from Antonio Berni, a Surrealist and New Realist Argentine artist known for large-scale murals, collages, and woodcuts. His work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art and featured in group shows there and at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Edward Burtynsky, Pivot Irrigation #7, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA, 2013. Chromogenic color print

Edward Burtynsky’s Water series explores the use and misuse of our planet’s most important natural resource—water. Pivot Irrigation #7 examines the topography of an area in Texas destroyed by the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. In 1948, pivot irrigation was invented, automating the growing process with a central pump and motor. The technology of irrigating large circles of land increased crop yields, revitalizing not only agriculture but the economy of the Great Plains region previously decimated by the Dust Bowl.

EDWARD

BURTYNSKY

(b. 1955 in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian photographer and artist known for capturing aerial views of the built environment—notably mines, quarries, and industrial landscapes, in sharp detail. Since the early 1980s, he has been on the front line of large-format color printing. His global locations feature the increasing development and scale of industrialization, and its impacts on nature and human existence. Deeply embedded in Burtynsky’s work is his advocacy for environmental conservation. His photographs explore the philosophical concept of the sublime, presenting disturbing subject matter on a grand scale within the context of rapid industrialization. Burtynsky’s interest in photography began at age eleven when his father gifted him a darkroom, cameras, and two rolls of black-and-white film. He studied graphic design at Niagara College and received a Bachelor’s in Photographic Arts from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto. In 1985, he established the commercial photography lab Toronto Image Works, and the following year, the lab opened a gallery space that displays the work of local and international artists. He has received numerous accolades for his photography and documentary work and has numerous photographs in the National Gallery of Canada’s permanent collection.

Edward Burtynsky, Silver Lake Operations #16, Lake Lefroy, Australia, 2007. Chromogenic color print

Silver Lake Operations #16 is one of several images in Burtynsky’s Mines series depicting the Australian Silver Lake facility, where miners extract precious metals. Each image can be construed superficially as an abstract work, with a composition of colors, contours, and skewed spatial orientation startling and ultimately thrilling. Nevertheless, the images are an equally striking record of our undeniable and irreversible impact on the land and the indelible marks left behind.

Edward Burtynsky, Tyrone Mine #3, Silver City, New Mexico, USA, 2012. Chromogenic color print

In the Anthropocene series, Edward Burtynsky considers how the ever-expanding human presence on the earth could impact our planet like one of the mass extinction events that have transformed it in the past. Landfills, freeway systems, suburban developments, farms, mines, and mills are all recorded in Burtynsky’s signature large-format compositions, whose formal details are overtly beautiful and startling.

47 David Benjamin Sherry, White Sands National Park, New Mexico, 2021. Chromogenic print

David Benjamin Sherry’s large-scale, often monochromatic photographs capture Western landscapes—sites in the raw wilderness that are already grand and awe-inspiring—and transform them into a world that seems surreal and even magical. The images employ what the artist calls “poetic distillation.” The intensity of scale and saturated color efface realism and bring the viewer to a new perspective, a moment to reconsider what they see and their relationship to the land.

DAVID BENJAMIN SHERRY’S

(b. 1981 in Stony Brook, NY; based in Los Angeles and Santa Fe) work often merges human and natural subjects and spans large-format film photography, photograms, painting, collage, and sculpture, all with an intense focus on color and composition. He received a BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale. While studying at Yale and working with Richard Benson, he began using vibrant, manipulated chromatics and analog printing techniques in his film photographs. In his work, the vibrant colors are a conduit for mystical connections as he explores themes of queer landscape, climate change, and the exploited landscape and history of the American West. Sherry has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Aspen, Moscow, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2007, he was awarded the Richard Dixon Welling Prize, and in 2011 received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Grant. He is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Morán Morán Gallery, and Huxley-Parlour Gallery.

48 Will Wilson, Shiprock Disposal Site, Shiprock, Navajo Nation, 36.769690596277414 N / -108.68547605691704 W, 2020.

Archival pigment print

49 Will Wilson, Mexican Hat Uranium Disposal Cell, Utah, Land Use Database, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Accessed November 5, 2020. Archival pigment print

Will Wilson’s series Connecting the Dots, which includes the two works seen in Deconstructing Landscape, documents the sites of abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation reservation in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. The photographs, many taken by drone, bear witness to a history of human and environmental damage and loss. The series is meant to confront viewers with the reality of a toxic legacy: the radioactive materials may be hidden under layers of rock and concrete, and the sites themselves, numbering in the hundreds on the reservation, may be remote, but humans and animals and the landscape itself continue to face the threat of poison.

WILL WILSON (b. 1969 in San Francisco, CA) is a Native American photographer and citizen of the Navajo Nation. Growing up in the Navajo Nation, he saw firsthand the impact of American colonization and exploitation on the landscape, particularly the extraction of uranium. Wilson studied studio art and art history at Oberlin College and received a master’s degree in photography at the University of New Mexico. He was an artist-in-residence at the School for Advanced Research and has created a vast digital archive of tintypes as part of the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX). Using a large format camera and the wet plate collodion process, he collaborates with Indigenous artists to create work that reflects Indigenous identities and challenges the history of Euro-American anthropological photography. His work incorporates Navajo mythology, depicting the toxic, postapocalyptic environments Indigenous communities inhabit while envisioning a future of rebirth and rehabilitation. His work has been exhibited at institutions like the Denver Art Museum and the New Mexico Museum of Art. In 2014, Wilson participated in “As We See It,” an exhibition showcasing contemporary Native American photography from esteemed artists like Matika Wilbur and Larry McNeil. His work also served as a counterpoint to Edward Curtis’s photographs at the Portland Art Museum in 2016. Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Studio Art (Photography & Media) at the University of Texas at Austin.

50 Unidentified artist, Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá with Female Donor, Late 17th–early 18th century. Oil and gold on canvas

The painting of Our Lady of Chiquinquirá originated in the 16th century, commissioned by Antonio de Santana and painted by Alonso de Narváez in Tunja, Colombia. Using a cotton manta, Narváez depicted the Virgin Mary flanked by Saints Andrew and Anthony of Padua. Over time, the artwork suffered damage due to moisture, but in 1586, it miraculously restored itself, appearing in vibrant colors. This event inspired pilgrimages to Chiquinquirá, where the painting now resides in a grand basilica.

Devotion to the image spread widely, aided by prints like one illustrated in Pedro de Solís y Valenzuela’s mid-17th-century novel El desierto prodigioso y prodigio del desierto, which referred to Chiquinquirá as “patrona del Nuevo Reyno de Granada.”

This Cuzco School painting reflects that legacy, blending local elements with the iconography of the original. The sitter, possibly the donor, is adorned in late 17th-century jewelry and lace, painted with remarkable precision. Birds, flowers, and an expansive landscape situate the scene in a distinct Andean context, typical of early 18th-century Cuzco artworks.

The painting’s proportions—wider than it is tall—echo the original Our Lady of Chiquinquirá, painted on a traditional Indigenous poncho. Yet, the addition of the sitter’s portrait and detailed landscape highlights the adaptability of this iconography in colonial art.

51 Unidentified artist, The Descent of Christ into Limbo, 17th century. Oil on canvas

This painting depicts Christ’s descent into Limbo, where He proclaims salvation to the souls of the Patriarchs awaiting redemption. Identifiable figures emerge from a cave setting, including Eve, holding a fig leaf and apple, and John the Baptist with his cross, while others resemble Old Testament kings and prophets.

The composition reflects a blend of European and Andean artistic traditions. Influences include Flemish engravings by Johannes Sadeler, Albrecht Dürer’s poses, and Jerome Nadal’s Annotations & Meditations on the Gospels, a widely circulated Jesuit print series. While Nadal’s engravings did not illustrate this scene, related prints of Christ’s post-Crucifixion appearances influenced the carefully composed elements, such as the fenced garden, awe-struck Roman soldiers, and the “Noli me tangere” encounter between Christ and Mary Magdalene.

The artist skillfully uses a palette of browns, greens, and blues to create spatial depth, drawing the viewer’s gaze from the cave to the distant cityscape. Intricate details—like the twisted trunk of a tree, Roman soldiers’ astonished expressions, and the three crosses of Golgotha—encourage close study of the narrative.

Framed with gilded carvings featuring Passion scenes, this work exemplifies the rich devotional art of the Cuzco School, blending European prints with local interpretations to inspire contemplation.

52 Unidentified artist, Mater Castissima, 1776. Oil on canvas

This painting honors the Virgin Mary’s chastity, symbolized by the enclosed garden (hortus conclusus) and the “sealed fountain,” drawn from Canticles 4:12. An angel with a flaming sword guards the garden, while a tree bearing pomegranates—a symbol of the Catholic Church—stands beside the Christ Child, who holds one in his hand. The theme reflects the Virgin Mary’s purity, highlighted by the inscription from Wisdom 4:1: “How beautiful is the chaste generation [with glory].”

The artwork replicates an engraving from the Lauretan Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Joseph Sebastian and Johann Baptist Klauber, first published in Augsburg in 1750 and 1771. These engravings illustrated Marian litanies, devotional prayers recited in honor of the Virgin. Widely circulated, the engravings inspired a series of paintings in convents and cathedrals across Peru, including those in Arequipa and Cuzco.

However, this painting was created as a standalone commission by Antonio Fernandos, a royal cavalry lieutenant, to express his devotion to Mary. The artist meticulously followed the engraving, including the name of Klauber and the imperial publishing privilege inscribed on the original print.

Distinct from typical Cuzco School works, which often favor red and blue palettes, this painting emphasizes lush greens to evoke the verdant garden setting. Its serene and symbolic composition reflects the deep connection between Marian devotion and colonial Andean art.

53 Manuel Zambrano, A Miracle of Our Lady of Quinche, c. 1888. Oil on canvas

This painting by MANUEL ZAMBRANO illustrates two miracles of Our Lady of Quinche, one of Ecuador’s most revered Marian images. Created as part of a series, the work commemorates the Virgin’s miraculous interventions. The upper register depicts two significant events: the Virgin saving the son of Marta Sumanguilla from a bear and her image illuminated by celestial light, surrounded by vibrant birds, a vision witnessed by the people of Oyacachi.

In the lower register, Indigenous residents of Oyacachi kneel and pray before the Virgin, with one figure playing a zampoña (Andean pan flute), reflecting local traditions. The Virgin’s image was initially sculpted in 1591 by Diego de Robles, a Spanish artist known for creating the Virgin of Guápulo. Over time, the Virgin gained fame for her miracles, attracting countless pilgrims.

In 1604, Bishop Luis López de Solís ordered the Virgin’s relocation from Oyacachi to El Quinche to address concerns about Indigenous religious practices and the dangers of the pilgrimage route. The Virgin was officially declared “Our Lady of the Presentation of Quinche,” and her feast day is celebrated on November 21.

Zambrano painted this canvas during the reconstruction of El Quinche’s sanctuary after the 1868 earthquake, likely to raise funds for the rebuilding effort. Like other Marian images, this painting may have been paraded to remote areas to collect donations, continuing the Virgin’s role as a unifying symbol of faith and devotion in Ecuador.

54 Unidentified artist, Noah’s Ark, Late 18th century. Oil on canvas

One of the most frequently illustrated stories about the fall of man from the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis is the scene of pairs of “every living thing of all flesh” entering the ark Noah built under God’s instruction.

This painting’s extraordinary charm lies in its intricate details. The artist has included European, American, exotic, and even fantastic animals: camels and dromedaries from Asia; horses and a peacock from Europe; a turkey and an armadillo, representing Central and South America; an elephant from Africa; water buffalo and a myriad of birds. Most strikingly, Noah’s immediate family is depicted traveling alongside an Indigenous family, who carry their belongings in bags and baskets onto the ark. In the background, the mountains rise majestically, resembling the grandeur of the Andes.

The animals are carefully arranged and painted with the precision of biology textbook illustrations; the composition comes alive through the dynamic gestures and windblown garments of the elderly Noah and his wife, the radiant beams of divine light, and the whirling, diving flocks of birds.

The Ark of Noah has long been interpreted as a prefiguration of the Church itself—a sanctuary where the faithful would find salvation, just as God saved the ark and its passengers from the flood. In Alonso de Villega’s Flos Sanctorum, the life of Noah is narrated in four chapters, one of which is titled “How the Ark of Noah was a figure of the Church, the one combatted by the waters of the Flood, the other by heretics.” Similarly, Antonio de León Pinelo, a Peruvian Creole, wrote in his 1650 Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo that God designed Noah as a prefiguration of Christ and that the Ark, symbolizing the Church, represented the “New World, under Spanish flags.”

55 Unidentified artist, The Creation of Heaven and Earth, 18th century. Oil on linen

Likely created for a private patron, this small painting was based on the opening phrases of the Book of Genesis. The creation of heaven and earth is captured in remarkable detail. The waters are separated from dry land with dramatic waves, while, on the far right, a fire-breathing volcano suggests the formation of new land. The sea roils with fish of various forms, the skies are alive with vibrant birds, and the land features mammals of various sizes birds. Some animals, such as the elephant and the unicorn, may have been known to the artist only through printed illustrations.

The composition is based on a print after Raphael’s Creation of the Animals in Rome. However, the print used by the colonial artist reversed the scene and was likely derived from another intermediate model. This reversal reflects a reinterpretation that is common in colonial art.

The painting’s subject transcends the creation of the animals, encompassing the creation of the entire world. God the Father is depicted dynamically, creating the sun, moon, and stars, a palm tree, and even a volcano not found in Raphael’s fresco. As with many Spanish colonial works, the artist has creatively enhanced the print source. In this painting, God the Father, draped in a vibrant red mantle, floats serenely above his creation, embodying the biblical declaration: “And God saw all the things that he made, and they were very good.”

Suiko Buseki, Billow of Waves, 2020. Tiger Bamboo

SUIKO BUSEKI (b. 1958 in Arakawa-ku, Tokyo, Japan) is a thirdgeneration bamboo artist based in Tokyo with his family. From an early age, he helped in the family shop and received his initial training in Bamboo from his father, Suigetsu, and grandfather, Suishin. He then received instruction from Iizuka Shokansai, a Living National Treasure. Buseki’s primary focus is delicate and sophisticated flower vessels. In Billow of Waves, his interest in sculptural forms takes prominence.

Buseki is a member of the Japan Industrial Arts Association and has work in collections at the Hasegawa Museum, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Hamburg Museum of Decorative Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Yakushiji Temple.

Buseki’s father told him, “Listen to the bamboo. If you bend the bamboo, it becomes curved, and if you bend it further, it will hurt the bamboo and break. If you stop just before that point, a graceful curve with a sense of tension is created.” Buseki said, “Bamboo, you know, no matter how thin you split, it is still very strong and powerful. I am attracted to the visual strength taut bamboo under tension.”

ENDO GEN (b. 1976 in Toyoda, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan; active in Beppu, Ōita Prefecture, Japan) majored in anthropology at a national university and did fieldwork in a small village. He became very interested in the local basket-making tradition and wrote a research paper there. After graduation, he returned to the village for training and studied in Ōita Prefecture, a significant bamboo art center where he lives today.

About fifteen years ago, he developed a signature style by combining two styles of bamboo plaiting characteristic of Ōita baskets. He uses varying widths of bamboo strips tightly woven together, repeating the undulating pattern that appears on many bamboo purses, briefcases, and tea ceremony boxes made in Ōita. He weaves these together tightly at the bottom and top of the basket but opens them up as it widens, creating a fascinating visual shift. He uses another typical Ōita plaiting pattern to hold everything in place, twining fine-cut bamboo strips that wrap around the vessel horizontally, creating wave-like lines.

Fujitsuka Shōsei, Galaxy, 2014. Hōbichiku, rattan

FUJITSUKA SHŌSEI

(b. 1949 in Hokkaido, Japan) creates a broad range of work, from typical basket and vessel forms to tea ceremony utensils and abstract sculptures inspired by nature. Just six months into his bamboo apprenticeship with Baba Shōdo and quick proficiency in the form, Fujitsuka participated in the Kanagawa Prefecture Art exhibition in 1973. His pieces defy neat categorization, which led to his rejection from exhibitions in Japan for decades. However, he persisted in making bold aesthetic choices and eventually gained international recognition and the freedom to express his distinctive voice. In 2023, he received the title of Living National Treasure of Japan. His works are in many collections, including the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Japan Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

As an avid amateur astronomer, he grinds his own telescope lenses and spends clear nights photographing the stars, providing insight into the inspiration behind his sculpture, Galaxy. He carefully flame-heats very long pieces of smoked nemagari bamboo, allowing for the complex bending needed for the sculpture. Each piece bends to follow the last, showcasing Fujitsuka’s expert attention, care, and precision, resulting in what seems like effortless craft.

59 Kosuge Kōgetsu, Shinano River, 1970. Madake, rattan, frosted mylar

As the son of Kosuge Chikudo, a well-known bamboo artist in Sado, and with a famous bamboo prodigy older brother, KOSUGE KŌGETSU (b. 1932 in Nagaoka Japan, d. 2016) felt content to stay out of the limelight and work beside his father in the family studio. He took to the art slowly but deeply, focusing on flower baskets and tea ceremony utensils. In his thirties, feeling he needed to be admitted to an important exhibition to guarantee a future for the family business, he began creating large-scale and stunning exhibition pieces, among them Shinano River. Daringly Modernist while still honoring the flower vessel and tea screen tradition, it is named after Japan’s longest and widest river, which flows near his home in Niigata. His accolades include the Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry Prize at Japan’s Flower and Tea Ware Art Exhibition and the Niigata Nippo Prize at the 16th Prefectural Art Exhibition. In 1972, he was made a Japan Craft Art Association member. He eventually became an independent artist, making baskets for himself and tea ceremony masters. His works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

MONDEN KŌGYOKU’S

(b. 1916, d. 2021) career in sculptural bamboo basketry spanned over fifty years, and he was one of the first bamboo artists to make sculptural objects as flower baskets. In 1933, he began as an apprentice to Kadota Niko, and since 1935, he has received numerous awards and prizes at the prefectural, regional, and national levels. During the time of economic turmoil after World War II, he created utilitarian baskets for wholesalers. He is known for his unique style in creating undulating sculptural bamboo using the “rolling weave” (uneri-ami) technique, embodied in Flower of Waves. The organic form of the basket twists and curves in on itself, evoking both the nature of water and a nest-like dynamic form. Monden was an active leader in his prefecture near Hiroshima, a judge for many regional exhibitions, and a teacher at the community college in Fukuyama City. From 1991 until his passing, he was a full Japan Art Crafts Association member. Monden’s works are in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, San Francisco Asian Art Museum, and Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC.

KOIDE BUNSEI (b. 1960 in Nagano City) runs a family bamboo basketry business in Nagano that sells bamboo lumber and is renowned for bamboo fence-making. At fifteen, Koide’s father showed him a book on Shōno Shōunsai, the first Living National Treasure in bamboo art. Koide went to a bamboo training school in Ōita; after graduating, he apprenticed to local bamboo master Iwao Honan for three years and then returned to Nagano. Making only one or two art pieces yearly, he has focused on simple forms that serve as a backdrop for his delicate repeated designs inspired by wheat sheaves. His artwork is characterized by a deep feeling of tranquility, and the natural color of dry bamboo relates to his bundled motifs of harvest-ready grain. His works have been extensively exhibited and received numerous awards, including eight prizes at the Nagano Prefecture Craft Arts Exhibitions and four at the Eastern Japan Traditional Craft Art Exhibitions.

62 Matsuzawa Kazuyoshi, Naruto, 1969. Susutake, rattan

After graduating from Meiji University, MATSUZAWA KAZUYOSHI

(b. 1931 in Tokyo, Tokyo Prefecture, Japan, d. 2009) studied bamboo dyeing techniques under his grandfather, Matsuzawa Kuhachiro, who opened the first bamboo dye shop in the Asakusa district of Tokyo in 1918. In 1964, Matsuzawa’s work was first accepted in the Japan Craft Arts Eastern Japan annual spring exhibition. The following year, his work was accepted into the prestigious and highly competitive annual competition, the Japan Traditional Craft Arts Exhibition. He quickly began winning prizes at the spring exhibitions (1967, 1969, and 1970), and winning best of show at the national exhibition in 1970 led to his becoming a full member of the Japan Craft Arts Association. Both of his prize-winning pieces from 1970 were purchased by the Agency of Cultural Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1973, he won another major prize at the Japan Traditional Craft Arts Exhibition, advancing him to Tokutai status—the rank from which Living National Treasures are generally selected. Matsuzawa served as treasurer and judge at the Exhibition in 2005 before retiring. In 1993, he was awarded the “Purple Ribbon” by the Japanese government for his lifetime achievement in the arts. He died accidentally, under mysterious circumstances, in 2009. His work is in the permanent collection of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Matsuzawa’s piece Naruto connects to the sculptural aesthetics of the famous Iizuka family. The family played a significant role in establishing the bamboo tradition in the Kanto region. As an artist from the region, Matsuzawa was immersed in its historic prominence for skilled bamboo craftsmanship.

63 Okada Tadashi, Winding, 1987. Madake, rattan, stainless steel wire

OKADA TADASHI (b. 1955 in Niigata, Niigata Prefecture, Japan) studied bamboo basketry first with his father, Okada Sessai, in 1975 and later, in 1984, under HONMA Kazuaki. In 1979, he was admitted for the first time to the Japan Modern Craft Arts Exhibition and the Niigata Prefectural Arts Exhibition. Like Matsuzawa Kazuyoshi, Okada also draws from his roots in the Kanto region. Present in Winding are the stylistic reflections of the Iizuka lineage and the “urban architecture” style of sculptors working in the 1970s and 1980s near Tokyo. Though he lived far from the capital, there was a regional identity that connected artists. His sculptural pieces in this style are extremely rare. Okada has also exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The International Asian Art Fair in New York, the Tigerman Himmel Gallery in Chicago, and the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. His works are featured in the museum collections of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, MFA Houston, and the Denver Art Museum.

Shigeo, Bond, 2014. Okamezasa, hobichiku, rattan

TANIOKA SHIGEO (b. 1949 in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan) first worked in advertising after graduating from design school. After seeing a basket by Shōno Shōunsai in a book, he realized his true vocation was bamboo art. Following an apprenticeship with Tanabe Chikuunsai II in 1974, Tanioka became an independent artist in 1984 and regularly submits works to the Japanese Traditional Art Crafts Exhibitions. He has received and won numerous awards and is a remember of the Sakai Art Association and Osaka Craft Art Art Association, as well as a full member of the Japan Traditional Craft Arts Association. His works are included in the museum collections of the Ruth and Sherman Lee Institute for Japanese Art, Sakai City Museum, and the Craft Arts Hall in Shiga.

Yako Hōdō, Sound of the Tide, 1980. Madake, rattan

YAKO HŌDŌ (b. 1940 in Teradomari [now Nagaoka], Niigata Prefecture, Japan) began to study bamboo in 1956, apprenticed to Nakajima Hoso for four years before moving to Tokyo and studying under Nakamura Yukosai for one year, then finally was apprenticed to Baba Shōdo for eight years. In 1961, he was admitted to the Niigata Prefecture Art Exhibition for the first time, and in 1968, he won the first of many accolades as the recipient of the Tokyo Governor’s Award from the Japan Art Exhibition. For Yako, mental preparation and conceptualization for his pieces like Sound of the Tide are just as important as skill, techniques, and improvement. His basket forms reflect both function and dream. He has an extensive exhibition history with solo and group shows worldwide. His bamboo baskets are in the museum collections of Fukaya City Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University.

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

1 Leo Villareal, Sky (study), 2009. Custom electronics, circuitry, LEDs, painted wood, Plexiglas. Photo by Kate Weinstein, © Leo Villareal, courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

3 Craig Dorety, Offset Circles-Yellow Flowering Tree Against Blue Sky, 2014. Custom electronics, LEDs, aluminum panel. Photo © Craig Dorety, courtesy of the artist and Johansson Projects.

4 Guillermo Galindo, Waveform Coded Landscape, 2015. Inkjet print; acrylic ink on cut Hahnemühle photo rag paper. Photo by JamieStukenberg, © Guillermo Galindo, courtesy of the artist.

5 Elias Sime, FORTHCOMING 6, 2009-2010. Reclaimed electrical wires, circuit boards, nails on panel. Photo by Jamie Stukenberg, © Elias Sime, courtesy of the artist.

6 Yael Kanarek, Terrain 9_3a_5: Entries and Exits, 2002.Acrylic face-mounted chromogenic print on paper, with hand-applied ink drawing. Photo courtesy of the artist and bitforms gallery.

7 John Gerrard, Flag (Amazon), 2017, Real-time generative custom software animation (color, silent), LCD monitor in custom steel frame. Photo by Duncan Bass, courtesy of the artist.

8 John Gerrard, Flag (Nile), 2017. Real-time generative custom software animation (color, silent), LCD monitor in custom steel frame. Photo by Duncan Bass, courtesy of the artist.

9 John Gerrard, Flag (Yangtze), 2017. Real-time generative custom software animation (color, silent), LCD monitor in custom steel frame. Photo by Duncan Bass, courtesy of the artist.

10 John Gerrard, Flag (Danube), 2017. Real-time generative custom software animation (color, silent), LCD monitor in custom steel frame. Photo by Duncan Bass, courtesy of the artist.

11 Judy Chicago, Women and Smoke, California, 1971–1972. Single-channel digital video, transferred from 16mm film. Photo by Through theFlower Archives, © Judy Chicago and Artists Rights Society (ARS), courtesy of the artist and ARS.

12 Michal Rovner, Blue Hills, 2018. Single-channel digital video, custom monitor. Photo courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

13 Carla Gannis, The Garden of Emoji Delights, 2014. Single-channel 4K video, 5:36 min. Photo by Jamie Stukenberg, © Carla Gannis, courtesy of the artist.

14 Penelope Umbrico, 48,586,054 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (Partial) 11/05/20, 2020. 1,440 chromogenic machine prints. Photo by and courtesy of the artist, © Penelope Umbrico.

15 Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds, 2002. Handmade hacked Super Mario Brothers cartridge, Nintendo NES video game system. Photo courtesy of the artist.

16 Ragnar Kjartansson, The Boat (Stephan Stephensen, Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir and Gyða Valtýsdóttir), 2015. Single-channel digital video, 2:36 hours. Photo courtesy of the artist and i8 Gallery.

17 Michael Bell-Smith, Up and Away, 2006. Singlechannel video with sound, 6:40 min. Photo by Kate Weinstein, © Michael Bell-Smith, courtesy of the artist.

18 teamLab, The World of Irreversible Change, 2022. Six-channel interactive digital work with sound. Photo courtesy of the artists.

19 Elias Sime, Tightrope, 2022. Reclaimed electrical wires, circuit boards, nails on panel. Photo by Izzy Leung, © Elias Sime, courtesy of the artist.

20 Petra Cortright, green hill green light esprit de corps, 2023. Single-channel digital video. Photo by and courtesy of the artist, © Petra Cortright.

21 teamLab, Life Survives by the Power of Life II, 2020. Single-channel 8K digital work. Photo courtesy of the artists.

22 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Shadow Tuner, 2024. Spherical LED display, depth cameras, speakers, powder-coated stainless steel base, custom software, power distributor, sound card, video controller, computers. Photo © Antimodular Research, courtesy of the artist and Antimodular Studio.

23 Terry Adkins, Miy Paluk 1866, 2012. Single-channel video with sound, 24:26 min. Photo courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery.

24 Bruce Conner, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, 1959–67. Two single-channel digital videos, transferred from 16mm film, 2:43 min./14:28 min. Photo © Bruce Conner Family Trust, courtesy of the Bruce Conner Family Trust.

25 Spencer Finch, Fire (After Joseph Wright of Derby), 2009. Laminated color filters and lightbox. Laminated color filters and lightbox. Photo by Kate Weinstein, © Spencer Finch, courtesy of the artist.

26 Allison Janae Hamilton, Wacissa, 2019. Singlechannel digital video with sound, 22:14 min. Photo by and courtesy of the artist, © Allison Janae Hamilton.

27 Matt Mullican, Untitled (Animated Cosmology, Overall Heavens, 9 Panels), 2005. Single-channel digital video, 13 sec. Photo by Kate Weinstein, © Matt Mullican, courtesy of the artist.

28 Bruce Nauman, Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor), 1999. Single-channel standard-definition video, 59:30 min. Photo by Sperone Westwater, © Bruce Nauman and ArtistRights Society (ARS), courtesy of the artist, ARS,and Sperone Westwater.

29 Paul Ramírez Jonas, Another Day, 2003. PBASIC code output to NTSC video signal, custom microcontroller, three monitors. Photo by Jamie Stukenberg, © Paul Ramírez Jonas, courtesy of the artist.

30 Woody Vasulka, Glass—Lucifer’s Commission, 1977–2003. Iris print. Photo © Woody Vasulka, courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary.

31 Richard Anuszkiewicz, Lino Sunset, 1969. Acrylic on board. Photo by Michael Tropea, © Richard Anuszkiewicz, courtesy of the artist and Michael Tropea Photography.

32 Karl Benjamin, Laguna Seascape II, 1954. Oil on canvas. Photo © Estate of Karl Benjamin, courtesy of the Estate of Karl Benjamin.

33 Ellsworth Kelly, Dark Blue Panel, 1981–82. Painted aluminum. Photo by Jamie Stukenberg, © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, courtesy of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.

34 Helen Lundeberg, The Blue Planet, 1962. Oil on canvas. Photo © Feitelson / Lundeberg Art Foundation, courtesy of the Feitelson / Lundeberg Art Foundation.

35 Lee Mullican, World, 1962. Oil on canvas. Photo by Michael Tropea, © Estate of Lee Mullican, courtesy of the Estate of Lee Mullican and Michael Tropea Photography.

36 Roland Petersen, Fall Cloud Shadow and Fields, 1972. Acrylic on canvas. Photo by Alex Schutz, courtesy of the artist.

37 Emilio Pettoruti, Lumiére Méditerranéene, 1958–59. Oil on canvas. Photo by Michael Tropea, © Fundación Pettoruti, courtesy of Fundación Pettoruti and Michael Tropea Photography

38 Jordan Nassar, Through the Window, 2022. Cotton, plain weave; embroidered with cotton in cross-stitches. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle, © Jordan Nassar, courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

39 Fritz Scholder, Arizona #3, 1982. Acrylic on canvas. Photo by Michael Tropea, © Fritz Scholder, courtesy of the artist and Michael Tropea Photography.

41 Georgia O’Keeffe, Road Past the View, 1964. Oil on canvas. Photo by Dale Kronkright, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, courtesy of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

42 Muzae Sesay, Bonding Hour Balcony, 2023. Oil, oil pastel, vinyl emulsion, and colored pencil on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist.

43 Carlos Rojas, Untitled,1976. Oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of the artist.

44 Edward Burtynsky, Pivot Irrigation #7, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA, 2013. Chromogenic color print. Photo courtesy of the artist.

45 Edward Burtynsky, Silver Lake Operations #16, Lake Lefroy, Australia, 2007. Chromogenic color print. Photo courtesy of the artist.

46 Edward Burtynsky, Tyrone Mine #3, Silver City, New Mexico, USA, 2012. Chromogenic color print. Photo courtesy of the artist.

47 David Benjamin Sherry, White Sands National Park, New Mexico, 2021. Chromogenic print. Photo courtesy of the artist.

48 Will Wilson, Shiprock Disposal Site, Shiprock, Navajo Nation, 36.769690596277414 N / -108.68547605691704 W, 2020. Archival pigment print. Photo courtesy of the artist.

49 Will Wilson, Mexican Hat Uranium Disposal Cell, Utah, Land Use Database, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Accessed November 5, (DATE?). Archival pigment print. Photo courtesy of the artist.

50 Unidentified artist, Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá with Female Donor, Late 17th–early 18th century. Oil and gold on canvas. Photo by Jamie Stunkenberg, courtesy of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation

51 Unidentified artist, The Descent of Christ into Limbo, 17th century. Oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.

52 Unidentified artist, Mater Castissima, 1776. Oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.

53 Manuel Zambrano, A Miracle of Our Lady of Quinche, c. 1888. Oil on canvas. Photo by Alex Schutz, courtesy of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.

54 Unidentified artist, Noah’s Ark, Late 18th century. Oil on canvas. Photo by Jamie Stukenberg, courtesy of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.

55 Unidentified artist, The Creation of Heaven and Earth, 18th century. Oil on linen. Photo by Jamie Stukenberg, courtesy of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.

56 Suiko Buseki, Billow of Waves, 2020. Tiger Bamboo. Photo courtesy of TAI Modern.

57 Endo Gen, Sunlight, 2011. Madake, rattan. Photo courtesy of TAI Modern.

58 Fujitsuka Shōsei, Galaxy, 2014. Hōbichiku, rattan. Photo courtesy of TAI Modern.

59 Kosuge Kōgetsu, Shinano River, 1970. Madake, rattan, frosted mylar. Photo courtesy of TAI Modern.

60 Monden Kōgyoku, Flower of Waves, 1977. Madake, rattan. Photo courtesy of TAI Modern.

61 Koide Bunsei, Mountain Range, 2008. Madake, rattan. Photo courtesy of TAI Modern.

62 Matsuzawa Kazuyoshi, Naruto, 1969. Susutake, rattan. Photo courtesy of TAI Modern.

63 Okada Tadashi, Winding, 1987. Madake, rattan, stainless steel wire. Photo courtesy of TAI Modern.

64 Tanioka Shigeo, Bond, 2014. Okamezasa, hobichiku, rattan. Photo courtesy of TAI Modern.

65 Yako Hōdō, Sound of the Tide, 1980. Madake, rattan. Photo courtesy of TAI Modern.

Based in Dallas, Texas, the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation collection includes over 1,900 works and spans four broad fields: Art of the Spanish Americas, Digital & Media Art, Japanese Bamboo, and Post-War Painting & Sculpture. In addition to exhibiting our collection at our two free gallery spaces, Art Vault in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and our Cedar Springs Headquarters in Dallas, the Foundation has loaned over 1,400 artworks to more than 250 exhibitions worldwide. We make a concerted effort to share our collection with the public, conserve the works in it, and provide documentation and research that puts each piece into a more widely understood context. We award individual grants and fellowships to support original scholarship across our collection areas, supporting research, symposia, and equity in the arts. Our grants for nonprofit organizations help fund innovative exhibitions, academic programs, and collection-related publications. In 2024, the Foundation launched the Thoma Scholars Program to help broaden access to higher education for promising rural students in the rural American Southwest. Working with our university partners, the Thoma Scholars Program is a comprehensive scholarship that helps talented students graduate with as close to zero debt as possible. Beyond financial support, the Thoma Scholars Program gives high-achieving students a path to promising futures through mentorship, educational support, and leadership training.

This catalogue was produced in association with the exhibition Deconstructing Landscape.

April 7, 2025–Early 2026 at our headquarters in Dallas, Texas

Kathleen Forde, Director and Curator, Media Arts

Veronica Munoz-Najar, Associate Curator, Art of the Spanish Americas

Meagan Robson, Collections Manager

Rachel Lewis, Collections Assistant

Sophie Ross, Graphic Designer

Madison Spencer, Communications Coordinator

Edited by Ruth Keffer, Rachel Lewis, and Madison Spencer