Professor’s Mint Museum Exhibition Explores Complexity of Human Engagement with Nature

On her first trip to the United States, when she was still a graduate student in her native Poland, Maja Godlewska spent the summer touring America’s national parks. Afterwards, her paintings of actual and imaginary landscapes became her thesis project and launched a lifetime of considering the sublime in nature and our sometimes fraught engagement with it.

In the decades since that initial tour, Godlewska, professor of art in the Department of Art & Art History, has participated in artist residencies and exhibitions in a long list of countries around the world: Greenland, Norway, Italy, Ukraine, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Ireland, Chile, Cuba, South Korea, Mauritius and Tasmania – among others. She observes landscapes and she also observes the tourists attracted to them.