Rockland Arts Center - A Permanent collection for the Hudson River School of painters and a museum of Industrial landscape Art in a reclaimed quarry

Hudson River Painters Exhibition - Perhaps more than any other single influence, the landscapes of the Hudson River Painters—romantic images of beauty,grandeur,and man’s relationship to nature—made the valley famous in art history.  It is appropriate, then, that the Heritage Area mount “The Landscape that Defined America,” an exhibition of paintings by the Hudson River artists, to celebrate the Heritage Area and the theme of nature and culture specifically.  In the mid-1830s the painter Thomas Cole traveled to Catskill to build a studio.  Cole had created the first distinctively American style of painting and a powerful identity for the young nation. 

For the next 70 years, Cole and his followers —Frederic Church, Asher Durand, John Kensett, Jasper Cropsey and others—explored the grandeur of the American wilderness.  Though they painted landscapes from the Catskills to the Grand Canyon, these artists are collectively called the Hudson River Painters.  “The Landscape that Defined America” will provide an opportunity to bring visitors and residents to galleriesand sites in the Hudson River Valley and thus combine tourism with scholarship.  The exhibition will have as many simultaneous venues as the budget permits.  The visitors will tour the exhibition from site to site along a Heritage Area Trail to see the Hudson River paintings selected and borrowed from a variety of museums, galleries and collectors.  

These venues could include: 
• Hudson River Museum, Yonkers
• The Cropsey Museum, Irvington
• The West Point Museum, West Point
• The Frances Lehman Loeb Gallery at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie
• The Senate House, Kingston
• Bard College,Annadale-on-Hudson 
• The Thomas Cole House, Catskill
• Olana State Historic Site (home of Frederic Church),Hudson
• Albany Institute of History and Art Albany