Suburban Sublime presents paintings, drawings, and photography from MCASD’s collection that reformulate traditional principles of the landscape genre to address urban sprawl and suburban expansion. Eighteenth-century notions of the “beautiful” and “sublime” landscape are at the base of contemporary attitudes towards the land.

Artworks in Suburban Sublime utilize these art-historical and pictorial constructs to juxtapose contemporary land usage with commonly held, idealized concepts of the sanctity of nature. The 18th-century “sublime” landscape represented unspoiled land in all its raw power to underscore the humility of man before nature whose overwhelming beauty was proof of divine majesty. Paintings by Jean Lowe, mixed-media works by Douglas Huebler, and photography by Becky Cohen, among other works on view, overturn this relationship positioning human actions, rather than divine will, as the decisive force generating our contemporary dystopic landscape.