Professor Salas Takes the Helm at MOWA’s Landmark Anniversary Exhibition

Ripon, WI – This spring, the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) opens The American Landscape: Beyond the Horizon — a sweeping reconsideration of two centuries of Wisconsin landscape art, timed to the nation’s 250th anniversary, and guest curated by Ripon College Professor Rafael Francisco Salas. The public reception is Saturday, May 2, from 2 to 4 p.m., with the exhibition on view through July 19.

Salas was invited by MOWA to take on the guest curator role — working alongside the museum’s curatorial staff to select works from the permanent collection, design the installation and write the conceptual framework that gives the show its shape. Alongside that curatorial work, he also was invited to contribute a selection of his own paintings, which features work from his newest travelling exhibition “Everyday Heaven.”

“My artwork in this exhibit uses the Wisconsin landscape to describe our American moment,” Salas explains. “It contains the pastoral beauty of rural Wisconsin, but also reflects its conflicts — political division, economic disparity and immigration — describing a more expansive view of what it means to live on the Wisconsin landscape today.”

“The American Landscape. It is the ground we walk on, the light that shines down on us from between the trees. The landscape is also a vessel of meaning. As we navigate the ground we stand on, we also define ourselves.”
— Rafael Francisco Salas, Exhibition Statement

The exhibition itself moves well beyond any single artist’s vision. Drawing on MOWA’s rich permanent collection and supplemented by significant outside loans, the show brings together paintings, photography, sculpture and video work that spans 200 years of Wisconsin life. Works by Georgia O’Keeffe and John Stuart Curry appear alongside contemporary artists.

The American Landscape: Beyond the Horizon is on view at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Ave, West Bend, through July 19, 2026.