In Dialogue: On Wonder and Witnessing at Tallulah Falls

This exhibition focuses on George Cooke’s “Tallulah Falls,” a pivotal example of early southern U.S. painting, by considering the notion of natural wonder and the dynamics of witnessing the natural world.

Nineteenth-century tourist destinations in North America, such as the cascades at Tallulah Falls in northeast Georgia and Niagara Falls in northwest New York, stood as emblems of the nation’s unblemished and powerful wilderness. American writers and painters like Cooke, Thomas Addison Richards and Henry R. Jackson believed that their visions of American nature were a patriotic project. They sought to associate the U.S. landscape with a sublime present and future in contrast to the picturesque past of the European Old World. In doing so, these early American painters sought to lay claim to the landscape for the white settlers and forcibly erase the histories of the Indigenous nations who stewarded the lands and waters.

The exhibition places Cooke’s and Richards’ landscapes alongside contemporary photographs of Tallulah Gorge by Caitlin Peterson, the exhibition illuminates the contradictions involved in marking off natural wonders and the paradoxes of witnessing nature. Through these visual conversations, 19th-century southern art is seen in new contexts, including in relation to Indigenous and environmental histories of the region.

“In Dialogue” is a series of installations in which the Georgia Museum of Art’s curators create focused, innovative conversations around works of art from the permanent collection. The series brings these familiar works to life by placing them in dialogue with objects by influential peers, related sketches and studies or objects from other periods.