Sunday, March 24, 2024, 2 – 3 p.m.
The Florida landscape has provided aesthetic inspiration to artists for centuries. Titian Ramsay Peale and John James Audubon came in search of native flora and fauna, followed by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Johnson Heade, George Inness, Winslow Homer, and Henry Ossawa Tanner, who were lured by its natural beauty and warm climate.
Later artists, including the Florida Highwaymen, earned their livelihoods selling paintings to tourists up and down U.S. Highway 1 and State Road A1A. In this presentation Dr. Keri Watson offers a succinct and engaging history of Florida’s landscape painters. Audiences will learn about the qualities and styles of American landscape painting, understand how landscape painting is linked to naturalism and environmentalism, and recognize the ways in which the Florida landscape participated in that history.
About Dr. Watson
Keri Watson is associate professor of Art History and assistant director of the School of Visual Arts and Design at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of several books, including This Is America: Re-Viewing the Art of the United State (Oxford UP, 2023) and Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education: Transdisciplinary Practices (Palgraeve Macmillan, 2023), and serves as Co-Executive Editor for Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Dr. Watson’s research has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Terra Foundation of American Art, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists. Her latest book, A New Deal for Florida: A Guide to the Sunshine State’s Post Office Murals will be out next year.
Admission to this event is free.
