Artist book included in Metropolitan Museum exhibition: Bruce Crownover, Todd Anderson

The Last Glacier, a 30-page fine art book created by Bruce Crownover (MFA 1989), Todd Anderson (BFA 1997), and Ian van Coller, is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from November 21, 2017 – February 5, 2018. The book was acquired by the Met in 2016, and is part of “Drawings and Prints: Selections from The Met collection,” in gallery 690. Of note is the last sentence of the overview that describes The Last Glacier and similar pieces, “…works by contemporary artists that deal with the environment, both natural and man-made, often in the face of rapidly shifting conditions.”

Of special significance for these three artists is that they are academic-based artists—that is they all work full-time at a college or university and never-the-less generate an independent body of creative work. The Metropolitan Museum is extremely selective in acquiring art created by any artist, let alone a living American, which includes “blue-chip” and full-time artists. Rarer still are works in the collection by academic-based artists. Furthermore, art acquisitions must be able to operate in context and conversation with 10,000 years of global art making and multiple curators must agree on that purchase. The Last Glacier has been selected as worthy of inclusion in the global canon of creative works, serving as a national record that will help future generations understand who we are.

To create The Last Glacier, the three artists traveled to the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park in Montana and Alberta, Canada to sketch, paint and photograph the park’s remaining twenty-five glaciers. This fieldwork is the basis for the creation of 13 original reductive woodblock prints and 10 photographs bound in a 25” x 38” book, in an edition of 15. The books have been sold out. Please visit TheLastGlacier.com for more information about the artists and their projects. Here is a link to a video that pages through the book: https://vimeo.com/136958784

The Last Glacier artworks and artist books can also be seen at locations including the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Special Collections), the US Library of Congress, Yale University, Stanford University, the Davis Museum of Art at Wellesley College, the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation Collection, and Clemson University.

The three artists are currently creating their next book, entitled ROMO, documenting the receding glaciers in Rocky Mountain National Park. Future projects include Escalante National Monument, Utah; Wind River Range, Wyoming; and Baffin Island, Canada, as subjects. This and other work will be shown in Madison, Wis., at the James Watrous Gallery, a program of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, at Overture Center for the Arts, November 2020 – January 2021.

Link to the Met show: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/drawings-and-prints-november-rotation