For our exhibition at the MK&G in Hamburg, we took a look at their collection and this is what we found: This Franzbrötchen represents the 400,000 graphic works in the MK&G Hamburg. The crumb represents works by women: 1.5%

For the exhibition ‘Women Reframe the American Landscape,” at the Thomas Cole Foundation, we declared the Hudson River School a white guys’ club that created fantasies about stolen indigenous land to sell to the same robber baron collectors who destroyed the environment.

Guerrilla Girls Reality Check: The Hudson River School

It wasn't a school, it was a club!

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It wasn't a school, it was a club!

…of white males who painted the American landscape, hung out together, and sold their work to many of the same collectors. Female painters like Sarah Cole and Susie Barstow were welcome to tag along with the guys, but couldn't expect the same recognition. They would have to wait 150 years for shows like Women Reframe the American Landscape.

Successful black landscape painters like Edward Mitchell Bannister and Robert Duncanson could admire the Hudson River School, but never join the club.

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Hudson River School paintings depicted a wilderness tamed by white settlers. When, in fact, the land had been inhabited, cultivated, and protected for millennia by indigenous nations...who endured genocide, disease, and war; only to be relocated elsewhere by broken treaties, unscrupulous land speculators, and acts of congress.

While HRS painters romanticized and idealized the stolen land, robber barons extracted whatever they could, and left a mess for future generations.

These same tycoons bought Hudson River School paintings, donated them to museums. and promoted an eden that never was.

https://art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s11/guerrilla-girls-in-bodies-of-knowledge/