With its forested hills that roll into blue-tinged mountains, and deep valleys split by winding rivers, Pennsylvanian Appalachia is easy to appreciate for its scenic beauty. But it is far from unspoilt. In the nineteenth century, logging, gas, and coal concerns began using those same rivers, as well as the newly built railroads, to gain access to the coal, gas, and timber whose extraction helped power the industrial revolution in the United States. Philadelphia in particular has greatly benefitted from the resource richness of the Pennsylvania interior, but at the latter’s expense—workers faced dangerous working conditions, and the destabilized environment was prone to fires, landslides, and floods. Layers of Liberty: Philadelphia and the Appalachian Environment at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) explores these and other inequities between the City of Brotherly Love and Appalachia, through art.
The exhibition was developed by PAFA Terra Foundation curatorial fellow and Appalachian art scholar Ali Printz, who selected paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings from the museum’s collection. Many artists featured in the show were students at PAFA and/or resided in Philadelphia. Some were from Appalachia, while others were what Printz refers to as “insider-outsiders” who “spent time [in Appalachia] making work, or there was some sort of something that caught their eye about the region that made them have a dialogue [with it].” Included are artists from communities not often associated with the Appalachian region, such as people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Printz believes that by featuring these artists, this exhibition is an opportunity to “upend the stereotype that Appalachian people are (solely) white and backward and conservative.”
Entering the galleries, visitors are greeted by a chronicle of Pennsylvania’s early history, conveyed through the pastorals of Jacob Eichholtz, Russell Smith, and the German-born lithographer Augustus Köllner, among others, who finessed signs of industry from their artworks in the romanticizing style of the Hudson River school. But between the late nineteenth-century coal boom and the Great Depression, when Appalachian Pennsylvania was transformed from farmland to a moonscape of quarries, coal mines, and logging camps, the industrial character of the state became impossible for artists to ignore. Ross Eugene Braught’s In the Valley (1922) documents a hill patched by lumberjacks, cast in foreboding shadow behind a sunny settlement. In Hubert Davis’s Spring in the Coal Regions, all that’s left of the region’s erstwhile beauty is a sliver of bright sky between carboniferous clouds.
Printz hopes Layers of Liberty will be a learning opportunity for the public. “I would like people that do not have a connection to Appalachia to start thinking about how much it’s affected the region, [Philadelphia], and the nation,” she explains, “because I think Appalachia serves as a microcosm for a lot of the issues that are happening on a national scale.”
Layers of Liberty: Philadelphia and the Appalachian Environment • Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts • to November 7 • pafa.org
