Arc of Promise

For generations, the American landscape has brought joy and inspiration to its human inhabitants. Today, amid uncertain environmental futures, how might visitors to The Met’s American Wing experience nineteenth-century landscape paintings? Caroline Gillaspie’s recent reinstallation of the American landscape galleries at The Met aims to foreground historic and present-day environmental concerns, Indigenous perspectives and ecological knowledge, and varying attitudes toward our responsibility to the land. The galleries include the loans of a Frederic Church homage to Thomas Cole (Above the Clouds at Sunrise) and a Kay WalkingStick painting (Thom, Where are the Pocumtucs (Oxbow)). Dr. Gillaspie will discuss her display and interpretive strategies for this refresh, and how the work is always ongoing. Caroline Gillaspie joined the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum in 2025 as a specialist in American painting and drawing. She received her BA from Mount Holyoke College and her PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center, focusing on Art of the United States and Latin America, particularly hemispheric landscape painting and environmental approaches to art history. Formerly an Assistant Curator at the Brooklyn Museum, she contributed to the transformative reinstallation of the American Galleries (Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art) and its accompanying publication.

The year 2026 marks the 200th anniversary of Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), the most renowned American landscape artist of his time. This talk will explore the ways in which global travel indelibly shaped his life and work. It will examine Church as an artist whose works engaged with questions of industrialization and environmental destruction, the rise and fall of empires, the construction of national identity, and the cataclysmic effects of slavery and civil war. Dr. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser is Curator Emerita at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and following her retirement in 2023, was appointed the Senior Curator and Chair, Frederic Church Bicentennial Committee for The Olana Partnership. She served as Co-curator and co-author for the exhibition and catalogue: Frederic Church: Global Artist, currently on view at Olana until October 25, 2026. At The Met she completed work on the new American Paintings and Sculpture galleries which opened in January 2012, and added transformative acquisitions to the collection. She served as co-curator for the major exhibition: Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, which opened at the Met on January 30, 2018, and traveled to the National Gallery, London, on June 11, 2018. Betsy was also the Co-curator for the following exhibitions at the Met: Rediscovering Thomas Hart Benton’s “America Today” Murals, 2014; Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River, 2015; and John Singer Sargent’s Portraits of the Arts: Artists, Writers, Actors, and Musicians, 2015. She served in a variety of roles as Deputy Director and Chief Curator, and Krieble Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art from 1985 to 2010. Her special exhibitions (all of which traveled) and accompanying catalogues for the Wadsworth Atheneum include: American Moderns on Paper, (Yale University Press, 2010-11); Neue Welt: Erfindung der Amerikanischen Malerie ( New World: Discovering an American Art, 2007), an international project with the Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, Germany; Samuel Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention (Yale University Press, 2006); Marsden Hartley (Yale University Press, 2003); Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe & American Modernism (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 1999); New Worlds from Old: 19th-Century Australian & American Landscapes (National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Australia, 1998); Joseph Cornell: Box Constructions and Collages (1997); Thomas Cole: Landscape Into History (1994); and Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic (Yale University Press, 1991). Her catalogue for the Ralph Earl exhibition won the 1992 Frances Tavern Museum Book Award.

Broderick Crawford won an Oscar as Willie Stark, an idealistic populist who rises from rural obscurity to political power – and gradually becomes as corrupt as the establishment he once opposed. Robert Rossen’s hard-hitting drama, based on Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, also won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress. * This film has been selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Charlie Chaplin’s final outing as the Little Tramp is a thoughtful and delightful critique of life in an increasingly mechanized world. From factory assembly lines to prison and unemployment, Chaplin blends physical comedy, romance, and social satire in a film that is perhaps more meaningful today than ever. Paulette Goddard co-stars as a spirited street urchin. “Modern Times” was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

John Sayles dramatizes the infamous 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of conspiring to throw the World Series. With a cast that includes John Cusack, David Strathairn, D.B. Sweeney, and Charlie Sheen, the film explores the pressures and divided loyalties behind one of baseball’s greatest scandals.

In Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist Western, Pat Garrett (James Coburn) is hired to hunt down his old friend Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson). Set against the constricting frontier, the film transforms their legendary confrontation into a melancholic journey exploring friendship, betrayal, and the myth of the American West. Bob Dylan provides the score and appears in a supporting role.