New Terrain: 21st-Century Landscape Photography

April 6, 2024–July 7, 2024

Gallery 223

Gallery shot of the exhibition 'New Terrain: 21st-Century Landscape Photography'

This spring, the Worcester Art Museum will present New Terrain: 21st-Century Landscape Photography, a new exhibition focused on how 21st-century artists use different photographic processes to explore the idea of landscape. Comprising approximately 30 artworks created over the past 20 years, the exhibition will highlight a wide range of techniques—including 3-D printing, weaving, embroidery, collage, and the use of nontraditional materials like rusted cans and lake water—that reinterpret the traditional practice of photography. Through these artworks, New Terrain serves as an entry point into deeper narratives about technology, identity, political activism, and history through the concept of the landscape. This exhibition is organized by Nancy Kathryn Burns, the Museum’s Stoddard Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs.

New Terrain gallery guide cover
View the gallery guide

This exhibition is generously supported by the Fletcher Foundation. It is also funded in part by the Hall and Kate Peterson Fund and WAM Exhibition Fund.


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Videos

  • Tad Beck harnesses light reflection to create abstract landscapes by photographing blank paper. In our interview with Beck, he describes how he hopes his work will cause people to rethink how they conceptualize and interact with photography.
  • In his Horizons series, Silvio Wolf explores the roots of photography broken down to its absolute essentials: light, time, and process. Watch our interview with Wolf, where he describes his artworks that “exist in the film before the picture is taken.”
  • Kate Greene’s artwork captures the first inhabited landscape in the United States that we are predicted to lose to climate change. Watch our interview with Greene, where she describes how she views the landscape through a lens of feminism and literature.
  • Ileana Doble Hernandez created Mirror as a reflection on the American dream after immigrating to the United States in 2011. Now, she invites visitors to bring their own stories and find themselves in her work. Watch our interview with Hernandez as she shares more about her art now on view in New Terrain.
  • Adam Ekberg’s photos start with a sketch, something unexpected he wants to see happen in the world. He then does whatever it takes to make that event occur. Watch our interview with Ekberg as he shares more about his work now on view in New Terrain.
  • Paul Vinet obscures the backgrounds of his photographs to reveal something new about what remains. Watch our interview with Vinet as he shares more about his work now on view in New Terrain.

Related programs

Selected images