Case Study – Buffalo Artists and Art RebornThe Past Is Future
Case Study – Staying Wild, Staying Healthy: Conservation and RecreationConclusion

A wilderness protected, maintained, preserved, in the midst of civilization.  Forever wild.

Upstate is fortunate to encompass and have protected vast swaths of land: 700,000 acres in the Catskills, over 6 million acres in the Adirondacks.

The Adirondacks Park is the largest publicly protected area in the continental United States, larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier and the Great Smokies National Parks combined.  It is the world’s largest intact temperate deciduous forest.  A natural as well as national treasure.

Open space, fields, forests, rivers, mountains, were initially threats to our nation’s expansion, threats to be overcome, wilderness to be tamed.  Over time, as cities like New York expanded following their natural course, the concept of open space shifted from threatening to desirable to essential.

This idyl of pastoral peace and calm in wilderness was captured in that early work by Thomas Cole and Asher Durand, whose work formed the basis of the Hudson River School of painting, capturing Upstate nature in its meditative calm and beauty. Nature and wilderness proved to be worthy artistic subjects, idolized on the canvas. What had before been unsettling and even fear-inducing, wild nature, appeared tamed within the frame and widely popularized.

A next generation of painters expanded their vistas well beyond the Hudson, traveling to other parts of the country and then the wider world, painters like Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, the leading lights of this next generation, along with numerous others, who tamed areas far afield from the Hudson, the American West and South America, with grand vistas captured onto their massive canvases, introducing and promoting natural grandeur to ever wider audiences who have never traveled beyond their neighborhoods or cities.

Plants and wildlife abound in the Adirondacks.  Old-growth forests cover more than 100,000 acres of public land.  To this very day.  The western and southern Adirondacks are gentle landscapes of hills, lakes, wetlands, ponds, and streams. In the northeast predominantly are the forty-six mountains known collectively as the High Peaks, with almost all above 4,000 feet and 11 with alpine summits that rise above the timberline.

As recreation resources, the Parks in combination are incalculable: vast accessible green spaces, within a day’s drive of from 60 to 80 million people.  Utilized they are, with 130,000 permanent residents in the northern park playing host to 200,000 seasonal residents and well over 12 million visitors yearly. Both are accessible and yet isolated and green and peaceful.

With population growth and now in the face of global warming, both parks and wilderness have come to be treasured as opportunities to purify the air, absorb carbon dioxide, reduce cities’ heat island effects and offer space for many forms of recreation, from picnics in the parks to hiking, canoeing and rock climbing in the Upstate wilderness areas.

Layers of history – geology, biology, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, commerce – abound in both the Catskills and the Adirondacks.  How to record and portray this complexity has been a challenge, met innovatively by a museum in the midst of the Adirondacks that has been 75 years in evolution to explain the region.  The Adirondack Museum, its original name on opening in 1957, celebrated much of the region’s history, from pre-history to Indigenous settlements and culture, then to early adventurers, subsequently subsistence farmers and ultimately the ultra-wealthy who imported their urban amenities to the wilds and their country homes, the “great camps” scattered through the Adirondacks.

Highly imaginative the museum is today, in fact a national leader in museum exhibition and display techniques.  Multiple display techniques in multiple buildings serve to stop-and-focus visitors, involve them through diverse interactive features and activities and encourage learning (form and forge memories, from a neuroscience point of view).  History, sociology, politics, architecture, environmental concerns, all melding with art to create an experiential visit with enduring memories and fostering repeat visits.