May 5
The View from the Bluffs: Landscape and Mood in Minnesota Territory
Tue, May 5, 2026
• 5:00pm
- 6:00pm (1h) • Boliou 104
This talk is proudly sponsored by the Edwin L Weisl Lectureship in the Arts sponsored by the Robert Lehman Foundation
Writing in 1899, the art historian Alois Riegl declared that the content of landscape painting was a modern “mood” in which the chaotic world around us resolves into a sense of harmony and restfulness. This lecture is an inquiry into landscape and mood in Minnesota Territory in the mid-19th century. It considers landscapes by artists who sought out panoramic views along the bluffs of the Mississippi River from which they could bring the surrounding territory into focus both as an object for aesthetic contemplation and as a destination for white settlement, and from which they sought to bring into focus the native Dakota people who were being displaced from the region at the time.
Presented by Michael Gaudio (Prof. of Art History, University of Minnesota)
from Art & Art History
Event Contact: Jessica Keating