Talks & Conversations

Mitch Epstein, In Conversation with History: Photographing American Culture and the American Landscape

Mitch Epstein, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Six Grandfathers, South Dakota 2018, 2018, printed 2025, inkjet print, Gift of the Artist, © Mitch Epstein, 2025.70.3

Join us for a presentation by artist Mitch Epstein, whose photographs are on view in three National Gallery exhibitions: Dear America: Artists Explore the American Experience, Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography, and American Icon: The US Flag in Art. Epstein will discuss his creative practice and engagement with the exhibition themes.  

Mitch Epstein (born 1952, Holyoke, MA) has photographed the landscape and culture of America for 50 years. A graduate of Cooper Union, he became a pioneer of 1970s fine-art color photography. His mixed media work includes films, moving image with sound installations, and performance. Epstein has been inducted into the National Academy of Design (2020) and has been awarded the Prix Pictet (2011), Berlin Prize (2008), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002). His 17 books include Recreation (2022, 2005); Property Rights (2021); New York Arbor (2013); American Power (2009); and Family Business (2004), winner of the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. Epstein’s most recent exhibition, American Nature, assembles three self-contained yet integrated photographic series (Old Growth, Property Rights, American Power), a multi-channel video-sound installation with tonal music performed in a forest (Forest Waves), and a looped projection with music (Darius Kinsey: Clear Cut). Together these five pieces investigate notions of wilderness and human society, and their both collaborative and troubled co-existence. Epstein lives in New York City and Massachusetts.  

The Elson Lecture Series features distinguished contemporary artists who are represented in the Gallery's permanent collection. The Honorable and Mrs. Edward E. Elson generously endowed this series in 1992. 

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Sheer, vertical, cliffs, brightly lit in cream white and rust orange by the low sun, tower over a band of people riding horses into the distance in this long, horizontal landscape painting. The glowing cliffs dominate the upper right quadrant of the painting. They lighten from burnt orange along the jagged tops to flame orange down the steep sides, and are and warm, parchment white near the earth. One tall, narrow promontory to our right looms over a range of lower, rounded cliffs. As the cliffs move into the distance, they are shrouded with a lavender-purple haze. The land closest to us dips into a shallow valley at the bottom center of the composition, leading away from us. The dirt-packed earth is dotted with pine-green, scrubby bushes and vegetation and a grove of low, gnarled trees a short distance to our right. One chestnut-brown horse walks along the path at the bottom center of the composition, lagging behind a cluster of at least two dozen horses and riders winding into the distance. The horses range from ivory white to tawny brown and charcoal gray. The riders are loosely painted so some details are indistinct, but they all seem to have brown skin and dark hair. They wear feathered headdresses and garments in teal blue, fawn brown, or golden yellow. They ride over a low hill toward a crystal-blue river, and then back along a flat expanse toward a row of minuscule, triangular tepees lining the horizon in the deep distance. The horizon comes halfway up the composition, and the tepees are backed by a row of rose-pink, flat-topped cliffs. A pale yellow disk hangs low in the sky, over the distant cliffs. The sky above deepens from soft, lilac purple along the horizon to ice and sapphire blue along the top. A few wispy clouds are burnished orange in the sunlight. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “TYMoran 1881,” with the T, Y, and M overlapping to make a monogram.

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