Description

This ambitious exhibition of paintings, sculpture, maps, and natural history artifacts will explore the impact made on American culture–science, politics, and art–by the extraordinary Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.  Although Humboldt spent only six weeks in the U.S. (after completing a four-year trek through South America and Mexico in 1804) his meetings with American leaders and his subsequent, seminal publications catalyzed a shift in the American understanding of the natural world and the linkage among American identity, ambition and the environment.  The exhibition will highlight the powerful impact of Humboldt’s idea of “cosmos”–the notion of a web of life in which everything in the universe is inter-connected—on a century of American art.