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Nature Has Something to Teach Us: Reframing American Landscapes at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
DATE: Saturday 10/17/26 TIME: 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Location: Charles Knox Smith Hall, 9201 Germantown Avenue
with Caroline Gillaspie, Assistant Curator of American Paintings and Drawing, Metropolitan Museum of Art
For generations, the American landscape has brought joy and inspiration to its human inhabitants. Today, amid uncertain environmental futures, how might visitors to The Met’s American Wing experience nineteenth-century landscape paintings? Caroline Gillaspie’s recent reinstallation of the American landscape galleries at The Met aims to foreground historic and present-day environmental concerns, Indigenous perspectives and ecological knowledge, and varying attitudes toward our responsibility to the land. The galleries include the loans of a Frederic Church homage to Thomas Cole (Above the Clouds at Sunrise) and a Kay WalkingStick painting (Thom, Where are the Pocumtucs (Oxbow)). Dr. Gillaspie will discuss her display and interpretive strategies for this refresh, and how the work is always ongoing.
Caroline Gillaspie joined the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum in 2025 as a specialist in American painting and drawing. She received her BA from Mount Holyoke College and her PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center, focusing on Art of the United States and Latin America, particularly hemispheric landscape painting and environmental approaches to art history. Formerly an Assistant Curator at the Brooklyn Museum, she contributed to the transformative reinstallation of the American Galleries (Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art) and its accompanying publication.