Full Description
With its dramatic landscapes and rugged beauty, Alberta's Bow River valley has inspired generations of artists. The Painted Valley brings together a collection of works by local and visiting artists from 1845 to 2000 that captures the many moods of the river and its valley from its source high in the Rocky Mountains down to the city of Calgary and eastward across the open prairie.
Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles have selected works from a number of Alberta museums and national collections, which depict the Bow River and its valley, representing a broad array of historical periods, artistic styles, and points of view.
From European topographers and military artists to painters commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, from the Group of Seven to modernism and abstraction, these pictures of the Bow valley tell us much about changing attitudes toward nature and the environment as well as the evolution of an artistic community in western Canada.
Contents
Introduction: No Catlin without Kane. or Really Understanding the "American" West. Turner versus Innis: Two Mythic Wests. One West, One Myth: Transborder Continuity in Western Art. A Northern Vision: Frontiers & the West in the Canadian & American Imagination. Transnational Perspectives on the History of Great Plains Women: Gender, Race, Nations & the Forty-ninth Parallel. Myths & Realities in American-Canadian Studies: Challenges to Comparing Native Peoples' Experiences. Prairies & Plains: The Levelling of Difference in Stegner's Wolf Willow. Whose West is it Anyway? or, What's Myth Got to Do with it? The Role of "America" in the Creation of the Myth of the West. Leading the Parade. Index.
