The Hood Museum of Art presents Edward Burtynsky’s Vermont Quarry Photographs in Context, on view April 21 through August 19, 2012.
Edward Burtynsky, Canadian, b. 1955 Rock of Ages #7, Active Granite Section, Wells-Lamson Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991 Digital chromogenic color print Photograph courtesy Howard Greenberg & Bryce Wolkowitz, New York / Nicholas Metivier, Toronto
Nature Transformed takes as its starting point a remarkable series of photographs by pioneering, internationally celebrated artist Edward Burtynsky (see image). His now signature pursuit of conceptual subjects—from oil extraction in the United States and in Azerbaijan to shipbreaking in Bangladesh—started in 1991 just fifty miles north of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, in the granite quarries of Barre, Vermont. One hundred years before Burtynsky encountered Vermont’s quarries, stoneworkers emigrated here primarily from the ancient quarrying town of Carrara, Italy, as artists and artisans to contribute their expertise to an industry in the throes of expansion. They brought along with them a love for opera, political activism, and strong values that made their assimilation into American society relatively easy. Nature Transformed considers a selection of Burtynsky’s monumental photographs—seven of which Burtynsky is showing here for the first time, including two he took in the little-known but extensive underground quarries in Danby, Vermont—within this context of Vermont’s social and cultural history as well as the much longer history of the geological formation of northern New England and its marble and granite deposits.
Edward Burtynsky will deliver a lecture at the museum on Friday, May 11, at 5:30 PM.
Hood Museum of Art
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
603.646.2808
[email protected]
http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/