At the end of this week the biennial conference C19 will be in Chapel Hill. I'm very much looking forward to the panels and hearing about a lot of topics that I don't normally have the chance to learn about. And I'm also looking forward to a panel on Saturday afternoon, "Picturing the Landscape in the Nineteenth Century." The panel description is as follows: "Focusing on paintings held by the Ackland Museum, “Picturing the Landscape in the Nineteenth Century” will explore the ways that artists in the United States and across the globe negotiated the formal and ideological challenges associated with representing land visually in contexts of nationalist expansion, imperialism, and colonialism."
The speakers are me, on “Fencing the Commons: Private Property and Progress in Antebellum Thought”; Ross Barrett of the University of South Carolina on “Reaping a Profit: Farming and Land Speculation in Antebellum Painting”; and Joy Kasson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's American Studies Department, on “Envisioning the Dark Underside of Progress: Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire.” The panel will meet in the Ackland Museum on Saturday from 2:45 to 4:15.
I'm going to be covering a lot of ground from an article a few years back on "Property and Progress," but I want to focus more intensely than did that piece on judges' attitudes towards private property and especially on how the landscape art correlates with judical doctrine supporting the development of property and the protection of private property.
The illustration is Asher Durand's 1853 landscape Progress. The program of C19 is here. A podcast of my talk is here.
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