Curating the West

Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, Ph.D.
Richard & Mary Holland Assistant Curator of Western Art
Joslyn Art Museum Omaha, NE, (402) 342-3300, www.joslyn.org

WAC What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
TBR I am planning the Omaha presentation of an exhibition that we have co-organized with two other institutions: All Aboard: The Railroad in American Art, 1840-1955. The show is travelling to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont and the Dixon Gallery in Tennessee before coming to us in February. Omaha has such a fruitful history with railroads, and I am excited that we can share a number of rail-themed works by significant American artists with the community.

Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872), Falls of Minnehaha, 1862, oil on canvas, 36 3⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 in. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, Museum purchase, gift of the Sherwood Foundation, 2023.12. Photograph © Bill Ganzel, Ganzel Group Communications, Inc.

WAC: Can you tell us about any recent acquisitions at the museum?

TBR: The Joslyn was closed for expansion and renovation between May 2022 and September 2024. In advance of the museum’s reopening, we added several significant works to our collection. For instance, I am proud that we were able to acquire a major painting by landscape artist Robert S. Duncanson last year. Falls of Minnehaha is one of the views of natural sites in Minnesota that he completed in the summer of 1862. He was traveling through the region as a brutal conflict opposed the U.S. Army and Dakhóta people. The work fits the new approach of our American galleries, in which we have integrated American and Native American art and history. Duncanson was a witness to a rapidly changing West and his oeuvre features many Indigenous figures. His art raises great questions about the representation of nature, settler-colonialism and American identity.

WAC: What excites you about the future of Western art?
TBR: I feel like so many new avenues for research have opened this past decade. American Western art is not just about cowboys on horseback and romantic landscapes! It is not a self-contained category anymore. Indigenous knowledge bearers and Native art specialists have embraced the concept to tell different stories. Curators and historians have questioned the geographical boundaries of what we call the “West.” As in our reinstalled galleries at the Joslyn, Western art can help address issues that are still relevant today: racial justice, economic inequalities, the preservation of natural resources and what constitutes a nation. I think these debates are attracting younger scholars, amateurs and collectors to American Western art as well, because it can now speak to the concerns of new generations too, rather than fuel nostalgia or be a simple mirror of the past.

WAC: What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
TBR: I have been thinking about the relationship between art and fire for a while. It all started with a painting that my predecessor brought into the museum: The Prairie Fire (1851) by Henry Ritter (no relation, despite our common surname!). Ritter’s picture interested me for a few reasons. He was a German painter who never traveled to the U.S. yet depicted the Plains. But the fact that he chose a wildfire as the central motif of this picture proves that it was a theme that was closely linked to the American West, even seen from Europe. From there, I started reading about the crucial role that fire has always played for Plains Indigenous communities, yet also about the ways Euro-American settlers used fire as a weapon against them, while making the burning prairie a sort of cultural icon. I would love to curate a show that explores the presence of fire in American art, from early illustrations of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels to late-20th-century land art in the West. When you look closely at the history of art in this country, fire is almost everywhere! —