Worcester Art Museum to Present New Terrain: 21st-Century Landscape Photography
Spring Exhibition Will Showcase Meditations on Place and Identity Created in the Past 20 Years, Featuring Nine New Acquisitions
This spring, the Worcester Art Museum will present New Terrain: 21st-Century Landscape Photography, a new exhibition focused on how 21st-century artists use different photographic processes to explore the concepts of landscape and place. Comprising approximately 30 artworks created over the past 20 years, the exhibition will highlight a wide range of techniques—including 3-D printing, weaving, embroidery, collage, and the use of nontraditional materials like rusted cans and lake water—that reinterpret the traditional practice of photography.
Through these artworks, New Terrain serves as an entry point into deeper narratives about technology, identity, political activism, climate change, and history through the concept of the landscape. Organized by Nancy Kathryn Burns, the Museum’s Stoddard Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, New Terrain will be on view April 6 through July 7, 2024.
“This exhibition offers us a chance to ask how the idea of landscape can be taken in unexpected directions by the use of different processes and materials,” Burns said. “This idea is especially relevant to bring to New England, which has a long-standing artistic tradition that often interprets the landscape as a direct representation of the external world; I’m excited to see that tradition turned on its head.”