Michael Scott's landscape paintings are featured in a new book, PRETERNATURAL, published by the Museum of New Mexico Press. The book includes 117 full-color paintings and essays by art historians and curators illuminating the artist's process and situating Scott within the broader history of the American landscape tradition. The book coincides with an exhibition at the Cincinnati Museum Center featuring Scott's landscape paintings—"America's Epic Treasures featuring Preternatural by Michael Scott" will be on display through January 8, 2023. The immersive art exhibition showcases the beauty of natural landscapes and the destructive and rejuvenating nature of the elements. Scott's onsite field studies included in the exhibition provide a look into the artist's process.
SANTA FE, N.M., June 1, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Michael Scott's landscapes embody the primacy of place. They draw from memory, archetypes, and iconic works of the American canon. His paintings aim not to capture a landscape's particularity, as such, but to infuse it with the regenerative spirit of nature itself. He brings to the work his own sense of wonder, enabling viewers to engage with it from their own points of view. They are rewarded with a portal into America's wild places, where the elements take center stage.
As MaLin Wilson-Powell writes, "Scott's paintings offer a place where the natural world, the human world, and the world of the spirit or the soul can commingle. Together they comprise an arena that oscillates between what is there and what is not there, what the artist brings to it and what the viewer brings to it."
In addition to 117 full-color paintings, Preternatural features essays by art historians and curators illuminating the artist's process and the ways in which his current series, Preternatural, situates him within the broader history of the American landscape tradition.
Preternatural coincides with an exhibition at the Cincinnati Museum Center featuring Scott's landscape paintings—"America's Epic Treasures featuring Preternatural by Michael Scott" on display through January 8, 2023. The immersive art exhibition showcases the beauty of natural landscapes and the destructive and rejuvenating nature of the elements. Scott's onsite field studies included in the exhibition provide a look into the artist's process. For more information on the exhibition, visit cincymuseum.org.
AUTHOR & CONTRIBUTOR BIOS
Michael Scott was born in Lawrence, Kansas. He studied painting at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he received his BFA. He was a recipient of the Skowhegan painting fellowship in Skowhegan, Maine, and received his MFA from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. His paintings of the American landscape and the American West are in numerous private and corporate collections, as well as the permanent collections of the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi; Cincinnati Art Museum; New Orleans Museum of Art; Tia Collection in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles; Tyson Collection of Contemporary Art in Springdale, Arkansas; Southern Ohio Museum of Art in Portsmouth; Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Whitney Western Art Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center for the West in Cody, Wyoming; and the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. He lives in Santa Fe.
MaLin Wilson-Powell is an art historian, author, and independent curator who has written, taught, and lectured widely on American Modernism and contemporary art. She is contributor to numerous publications including Jerry West: The Alchemy of Memory and is the co-author of Mabel Dodge Luhan and Company.
Laura F. Fry is a Senior Curator and Curator of Art at the Gilcrease Museum and an American art and design specialist.
Amy Scott is Executive Vice President, Research and Interpretation, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator of Visual Arts at the Autry Museum of the American West.
Elizabeth Wiecher Pierce is President & CEO of the Cincinnati Art Center.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Museum of New Mexico Press is an award-winning publisher of finely designed and crafted books that explore cultures of the Southwest and beyond. For more information, please visit http://www.mnmpress.org.
Media Contact
Lisa Neal, Museum of New Mexico Press, 1 (505)476-1155, [email protected]
SOURCE Museum of New Mexico Press

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