Landmines: Dawoud Bey, Christina Fernandez, Richard Mosse, Rick Silva

Curated by Sophie Landres

February 8 – July 13, 2025
Morgan Anderson and Greenberg Galleries

Landmines: Dawoud Bey, Christina Fernandez, Richard Mosse, Rick Silva presents camera-based work by artists exploring the role landscape plays in burying or exhuming social history. It coincides with the bicentennial of Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole’s first trip up the Hudson River. The trip is often recounted as the origination of an art movement lauded for pastorals that were inflected with Protestant ideals. Yet what this exhibition commemorates is a confluence of events that give broader significance to the year 1825 and that compel us to think critically about the relationship between land, representation, and history. 200 years ago was also when the earliest existing landscape photographs were taken and when large populations of Native people from New York were forcibly relocated to Wisconsin. Through photographs and video that shed light on sites of exploitation, Landmines commemorates this laden anniversary by offering contemporary perspectives on what landscapes recall about ourselves. 

Dawoud Bey’s poetic survey of overgrown, unpeopled former plantations coaxes history from what he refers to as “inscrutable” places of trauma. Allowing the horror of slavery to hauntingly complicate the bucolic scenery, his photographs reclaim landscapes as sites of "Black bodies in captivity and aspiration.” A photocollage and installation of index cards planted in rows of soil by Christina Fernandez reconnect land in Southern California to the often-overlooked history of the people who work it. Honoring migrant farmworkers while exposing their hardship, the imagery shifts the popular conception of the border region from a place of tech industry notoriety to an important site in the history of the Chicano Movement for liberation and empowerment. Richard Mosse uses an array of advanced photography techniques to document the environmental devastation in and around the Amazon Basin that has culminated from a long history of colonial conquest. Through multispectral satellite and ultraviolet microscopic imagery, he exposes (photographically and investigatively) the staggering degree to which mining and agribusiness continue to wreak havoc on both indigenous communities and vital ecosystems. Against drone footage of four areas that lost their protection as National Monuments under the first Trump Administration, Rick Silva superimposes digital renderings of subterranean minerals. By drawing attention to how mining and energy companies threaten public as well as sacred indigenous land, Silva reminds us that as the political landscape shifts, so does the geological, perhaps irreparably. 

Two objects from the Dorsky Museum’s permanent collection will also be on view. A display of pages from Thomas Cole’s 1828 sketchbook featuring a poem on artmaking, en plein aire sketches, and color notations greets visitors as a prologue to the exhibition. As a postscript, Provenance (2023) by Erin Lee Antonak (Wolf Clan member of Oneida Indian Nation) ruminates on a childhood experience losing a homemade moccasin in a Catskill Mountain range. In dialog with Landmines, these works prompt consideration of how artists from different eras understand their time or place in the world, what beliefs guide traditional and experimental approaches to depicting a region, why landscapes continue to inspire artistic imagination, and the role museums play in framing historic narratives. 

Landmines takes place on the unceded and ancestral homelands of the Munsee-speaking Esopus of the Lenape people. It inaugurates a Dorsky Museum initiative to rethink what it means to be a regional art museum in the context of our region’s history of colonial violence against Native communities and both the institutional and art historical practices that marginalize the cultures of people who have been exploited on these lands. 

Landmines is made possible with support from Art Bridges.