CATSKILL, NY .- The Thomas Cole National Historic Site announced today that a new exhibition titled “ALAN MICHELSON: Prophetstown” – a solo exhibition of work by the acclaimed artist Alan Michelson (Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River) – will open on Saturday, July 20, as part of Upstate Art Weekend, and run through December 1, 2024, at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY.

“ALAN MICHELSON: Prophetstown” is a site- responsive solo exhibition presented throughout Thomas Cole’s 19th-century home and grounds.

Addressing, from an Indigenous perspective, history, landscape, ecology and their many intersections, the exhibition includes a room-size installation of Prophetstown (2012) as well as other video and mixed media works installed in conversation with the historic house, collections, and landscape.

Titled after the community on the Wabash founded in 1808 by Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa (aka the “Prophet”), Prophetstown is both an homage to their movement to unite the tribes against settler encroachment, and a critical engagement with American culture and history. Featuring paper models overlaid with texts or other treatments, Prophetstown mixes fictional references – the log cabin in Thomas Cole’s 1847 painting Home in the Woods, for example – with historical ones like a facsimile of the illicit 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne.

Other works in the exhibition include the New York debut of the multimedia installation
Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer); the nocturnal Hudson video panorama Shattemuc; No York, a classroom map of New York State overpainted to eliminate non-Indigenous place names; and The Ratio of Art to Nature, four black mirrors installed on the grounds reflecting discrete views of the landscape. In ensemble, these works reframe the American landscape by tracing the violent and unethical means by which it was appropriated, “settled”, and exploited, history mostly absent from the scenic landscapes of Thomas Cole and his followers, as well as from cultural memory.

Alan Michelson is an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, and lecturer. For more than 30 years, he has been a leading practitioner of a socially engaged, critically aware, site-specific art grounded in local context and informed by the retrieval of suppressed histories. Recent exhibitions include the 14th Gwangju Biennale, Enmeshed at the Tate Modern, Greater New York 2021 at MoMA/PS1, and Alan Michelson: Wolf Nation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Michelson’s work is represented in such prominent collections as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. His varied practice includes award-winning public art, and The Knowledge Keepers, his inaugural Huntington Avenue Entrance Commission for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will open on November 14, 2024.

“Thomas Cole and followers responded to the beauty of Turtle Island (North America) with beautiful paintings that at the same time hid the ugliness of colonization and its brutal effects, not only on the Indigenous landscape, but on all of the life it supported, human and other-than- human,” said Alan Michelson. “As a maker of site-specific work that connects history to landscape, having my work exhibited at the site where Cole created his is extraordinary.”

“For nearly three decades, Alan Michelson has been bringing repressed histories to light, centering the important themes of land and place,” said Elizabeth B. Jacks, Executive Director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. “We are excited and honored to share this extraordinary artist’s work here at Thomas Cole’s home.”

"Alan is a visionary artist whose important, poetic, and captivating work has transformed how we understand the history of the United States, landscape, and the deep interconnections between industrial development and ecological crisis,” said Kate Menconeri, Chief Curator of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. “These are topics that the 19th-century artist Thomas Cole wrestled with in his own work, so it is a long-time dream to bring Michelson’s work here, in this unprecedented site-responsive exhibition that meaningfully centers Indigenous histories and critical perspectives."