William Charles Anthony Frerichs (American,1829-1905), Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, undated, oil on canvas, 22 1/4 x 34 in. framed. Gift of the Collection of Welborn & Patricia Alexander. BRAHM Permanent Collection, 2014.1.03.

Art allows humans to imagine people and places they’ve met or visited, but that imagining is always mediated by the artist and their own perspective. As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, Americans used visual art to imagine North American environments and their place within those landscapes. This talk will examine how artists, tourism boosters, politicians, and others, wielded landscape painting and photography to various ends, including the dispossession of Indigenous lands, imagining technological futures, and the creation of the national park system in the United States.

Dr. Stephan Hausmann

Author Bio:
 Dr. Stephen Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at Appalachian State University, where he teaches courses on environmental history, national parks history, and US history broadly. He previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. In 2024-2025, he was a Mellon-National Park Service research fellow at Mount Rushmore National Memorial. His current research project is an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota.