Histories are neither static nor singular but evolving and expanding as myriad voices come into view. In a new solo exhibition, artist Anna Plesset illuminates the extraordinary work and dynamic circle of 19th-century women painters who actively painted, hiked, and exhibited their work alongside Hudson River School icons such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and Asher B. Durand but who were written out of 20th-century art history books and exhibitions.

Drawing upon critical vision, carefully researched histories, and a meticulous creative practice informed by the history of trompe l’oeil painting, Plesset’s immersive exhibition spanning painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installation is a project of critical recovery that recenters women into the history of landscape art and further questions the processes that create historical narratives.  

Plesset was galvanized by American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School, the exhibition and publication presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1987, which included 84 artworks by 25 male artists, and not a single work by a woman. In this iconic, canon defining exhibition about American landscape painting, women artists are omitted and systematically erased. Today many museum collections and history books continue to present the Hudson River School as a “fraternity” of male artists, but we know the names of over fifty women artists who, as early as 1818, were painting and later exhibiting their accomplished landscapes alongside some of the movement’s most well-known male artists. 

As an act of revision, Plesset created four distinct series that are on view in this exhibition, including a series of trompe l’oeil sculptures based on the Met’s American Paradise exhibition catalog. Made of cast resin and painted entirely in oil, Plesset’s imagined editions feature paintings by women in the frontispiece, a space originally occupied by Asher B. Durand’s The Beeches. For example, in American Paradise (Third Edition), Plesset paints Julie Hart Beers’ Summer Woodlands as the frontispiece, literally inserting her work back into the narrative. Meaningfully, the painting Plesset chose was in 2021 the first Hudson River School landscape painted by a woman to become a part of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

Savvy to the way that art histories are written not only in books but through exhibitions, Plesset’s reframing also includes an installation that restages a section of the original 1987 American Paradise show featuring The Beeches and other works by Durand. Yet, in the artist’s revision, Durand’s works have been taken down, appearing as traces or shadows, leaving space for the active work of this exhibition to make visible the ongoing work of reading and making histories. In conversation with this is her painting series Value Studies, in which Plesset utilizes traditional painting techniques to create to-scale reproductions of major works that were made by 19th-century artists Louisa Davis Minot, Susie M. Barstow, Laura Woodward, Harriet C. Peale, Ann Sophia Towne Darrah, and Julie Hart Beers. But Plesset’s contemporary versions, in contrast to the 19th-century works that she references, are unfinished “exercises” in various states of progress and include trompe l’oeil paintings of Google search results and other source material depicting the original artworks. Playing with the idea of tracing or the copy, widely employed by artists in the 19th century, the artist notes: “By copying the works of these women and intentionally leaving my paintings in progress, I hope to make visible the act of historical recovery and acknowledge that act as always in progress and never finished.”

Here in this space of the exhibition, history is expansive, dynamic, in-flux, and bursting with the names of the many 19th-century women who lived and worked in New York. For the occasion of her exhibition, Plesset created Some Women Landscapists, a map that dives beyond the well-known Tenth Street Studios of Church and other Hudson River School painters to identify the location of over 40 studios of 25 women artists working in 19th-century New York. This is the first known map to make visible and physical the extensive and extraordinary history of women working here. Plesset’s intelligent and captivating works are a major contribution to the history of art as we have not yet known it and forge critical connections with our own moment, asking us to consider the ongoing work to understand our histories and our enduring agency to imagine our futures. Historical revision is always happening, and this project dives deep into that buoyant rising wave. The artist states it best: “By recentering this movement around women who defied expectations by conquering mountains and painting along the way, my work aims to highlight the role these women played in helping to shape a resistance movement that continues today.”

• Kate Menconeri, 2024