Cross Country: The Power of Place in American Art, 1915–1950

Hale Woodruff
American, 1900–1980
Oil on canvas
Collection of Talladega College, Talladega, AlabamaCommemorating the 1867 founding of Talladega College, Opening Day at Talladega College shows former slaves registering, bringing with them farm animals and other goods as tuition payment. This painting is part of a series of six murals illustrating the journey from slavery to freedom.Hale Woodruff painted the series to hang in the college’s new library, knowing that from this vantage point the viewer would see across campus to Swayne Hall, Talladega College’s founding building constructed by slaves before the Civil War. Woodruff, who established the first art school in the South open to African Americans, here brings together past and present to celebrate change and opportunity.

Bill Traylor
American, 1854–1949
Poster paint and graphite on cardboard
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Purchase with funds from Mrs. Lindsey Hopkins Jr., Edith G. and Philip A. Rhodes, and the Members Guild, 1982.99Bill Traylor, who began his life enslaved on a rural plantation, never received artistic training, but his evocative portrayals of life in Montgomery, Alabama has captured the imaginations of many. In a chance encounter, fellow artist Charles Shannon noticed Traylor sitting on Monroe Street in Montgomery, drawing people and animals as they passed by. Shannon was moved by the pictures and became a great supporter and proponent of Traylor’s work. Traylor often began his compositions with geometric shapes and perfected them with restrained lines and bold pops of color. He preferred to draw on old cardboard even after Shannon began bringing him art supplies.

Charles Sheeler
American, 1883–1965
Oil on canvas
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1971Charles Sheeler took inspiration for his painting Staircase, Doylestown from an 18th century farmhouse he had rented for several years in Doylestown, Pennsylvannia. He likely worked from starkly lit, black-and-white photographs he had taken—studies in shapes and patterns, solids and voids. This cool, analytical view of the winding corner stairs—a common feature in colonial-era Pennsylvania German architecture—exalts the simple and efficient design of a bygone era alongside the smooth geometry of the modern.

Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses)
American, 1860–1961
Oil on canvas
Private Collection, courtesy of Galerie St. Etienne, New York
© 1946 (renewed 1974) Grandma Moses Properties Co., New YorkThe snow-covered New England countryside appears untouched by time in the paintings of Anna Mary “Grandma” Robertson Moses. In this painting, she stages a quintessential northeastern ritual: bringing in buckets of maple sap to process into maple syrup. Grandma Moses was born in 1860 and she had firsthand experience with all kinds of agrarian practices and rituals like this. She often excluded the trappings of modern society, things like telephone poles and cars and railroads, to focus on the customs of the past. The human activity that Moses depicted in this work remains a treasured regional pastime.

Dale Nichols
American, 1904–1995
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of D. Wigmore Fine Arts, New York
© Joan Nichols LenhartDale Nichols grew up in David City, Nebraska, where he formed an intimate connection to barns and rural life—his most enduring subjects. The brief two months he spent in Chicago catapulted Nichols to a career in art, first in illustration and commercial art and then in fine art. The classic red barn seen in Spring Turning was a reminiscence of his childhood (before the Depression or Dust Bowl) that he painted while living in a vastly different environment in the Sabino Canyon of Arizona.

Ansel Adams
American, 1902–1984
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Purchase in honor of Mrs. C. Peter Siegenthaler, President of the Members Guild, 1974–1975, 74.107In 1932, photographers including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham formed Group f/64 in San Francisco. These artists worked diligently to elevate photography as a fine art and to articulate what was distinct about the medium. Using the smallest aperture of a camera, f/64, they created sharply focused images with rich tonalities. These photographers found fitting subjects for their aesthetic goals in the grand open spaces of the Western landscape, the botanicals that thrive in the arid climate, and the peculiar textures of the rural West.