The Vanishing American Frontier

This publication accompanied an exhibition that traveled from the Montclair Art Museum (where it opened in February 1995), to the Farnsworth Art Museum, Allen R. Hite Art Institute, the Art Museum of the State of New York at Plattsburgh, and Bryn Mawr College (where it closed in May 1996). Assembled by the author (and exhibition curator) are the original drawings and lithographs Bernarda Bryson Shahn prepared for a project inspired in 1935 by the Resettlement Administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Bryson Shahn envisioned a revisionist social and political history of the United States that included images of the Atlantic slave trade, ecological destruction of the hinterlands during the Dust Bowl, the labors of miners and farmers, and a collective portrait of the Empire Builders who rose to command the national economic power structure.

Bryson Shahn's original artistic style is discussed as is the influence on this project of the photographic work of Ben Shahn, her colleague and partner. The couple drove together through the south and midwest when Ben Shahn was among the noted photographers commissioned by the Resettlement Administration to provide a record of the faces and the human costs of a nation in travail - of people who might benefit from the relief programs.

The publication concludes with a bibliography and a biographical sketch of Bryson Shahn which is accompanied by a photograph of her at age 81. Limited to 1750 copies, the publication was expertly printed by The Stinehour Press in Vermont and designed by Jerry Kelly.