About the Exhibition

Picturing a coastline is difficult. Maps often show the edge between land and sea as a clean line, but coastlines are constantly shifting margins shaped by environmental, political, and economic pressures. In the first century and a half of the United States' history, these unstable, vital landscapes helped spur major cultural and artistic developments, and artists like Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, and Rockwell Kent were drawn to the coastline for inspiration.

CoastLines: American Prints and Drawings features artworks from the Clark’s own Works on Paper collection and explores how leading American artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depicted the coastline, its ever-changing expanse, and its relationship to human activity. The simultaneous development of the leisure industry, travel tourism, and coastal industrialization brought a wide range of people and interests to the shore, provoking competing visions of what the coastline could mean and who it belonged to. Coinciding with the United States’ semi-quincentennial (250th anniversary), the exhibition's collection of works also invites visitors to consider how the coastal environment, the Atlantic Ocean, and their representations shaped early national identity and imagination.

CoastLines: American Prints and Drawings is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Hannah Chew, Class of 2026, Williams College/Clark Graduate Program in the History of Art.

CoastLines: American Prints and Drawings is made possible by Chrystina and James R. Parks.