All Aboard: The Railroad in American Art, 1840 - 1955

The railroad transformed modern existence in nineteenth-century America (and around the world). There was simply nothing like the power of railroads for transporting people and products between growing metropolitan centers in the eastern United States and ever westward across the continent. By the 1850s, American railways had effectively stitched together a still relatively new nation in a manner its citizens could scarcely have imagined just thirty years earlier. Just as the digital revolution has in the present day, the railroad largely reinvented the American experiment in the nineteenth century.

The history of the railroads in the United States is also the history of many other things. The unfettered rise of this extraordinary technology ushered in a second Industrial Revolution, facilitated restless western expansionism, gave rise to the flawed ideology of Manifest Destiny, sparked the first spectacular wealth creation in America and the inequality that accompanied it, and contributed to the steady destruction of Indigenous ways of life. By the dawn of the Gilded Age, railroads had fundamentally transformed any number of related industries, from coal mining to steel production, and introduced innovations never before seen in banking, finance, modern warfare, farming and ranching, tourism, urban planning, and, unmistakably, if inadvertently, in the fine art of oil painting.

All Aboard: The Railroad in American Art, 1840–1955 examines the often-symbiotic relationship between painters in the United States and the passenger and freight trains that populated cities, towns, and countrysides across the nation. As seen through the eyes of some of our country’s most consequential artists, the exhibition traces the evolution of trains from the “devillish iron horse” of the mid-nineteenth century to an industrial powerhouse at the turn of the century, and ultimately by the mid-twentieth century, to a pageant of expressive metaphor and even quaint nostalgia. In following the railroad’s technological advances, the exhibition also tracks the progression of American painting, from the sublime canvases of the Hudson River School to hard-edged abstraction.

Hours: Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday 1-5 p.m.; third Thursday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

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