Village Street Scene with Mountains 19th-20th century

Editor: This is Denman Waldo Ross's "Village Street Scene with Mountains," currently housed at the Harvard Art Museums. It's an oil painting and really captures a sense of place, but it also feels… distant, almost like a memory. What do you see in this piece? Curator: I see a landscape steeped in the legacy of colonialism. The idyllic scene—the quaint village, the majestic mountain—masks the social and economic realities of the people who inhabit this space. Who owns the land? Who benefits from the picturesque scenery? Editor: That's not something I immediately considered. Curator: These kinds of images often romanticize marginalized communities. Ross, as an American artist, is viewing this landscape through a particular lens shaped by power dynamics. We must be critical of whose stories are being told, and whose are being left out. Editor: That provides a very important frame for understanding art. Thank you!