Events for December 31, 2025

From the luscious panoramic landscapes of the Hudson River School to Maynard Dixon’s seemingly endless cloud filled skies set behind painted mesas to Grant Wood’s overly saturated and stylized pastoral scenes of the Midwest, American painters have long shaped a romantic vision of the land. These images helped construct a narrative of the United States as expansive, untouched, and waiting to be explored. This myth has further been perpetuated by tourism imagery, National Park postcards, and idealized and sometimes altered travel photography. Yet the land has always borne evidence of habitation, use, and intervention. This tension between the idealized landscape and