(ethereal music plays) (serene music plays) - [Elizabeth Jacks] Thomas Cole's paintings were an answer to what the other writers, and artists, and thinkers at the time were looking for, which is "What is this country going to be?

"What is our culture, what is our identity?"

And at the time they didn't, it was pretty new country so they didn't know what this country was going be like.

And now maybe we'll think about, "Oh, it's apple pie," or, you know, there's sort of things that we associate with America.

But back then they were searching for that.

And Thomas Cole's answer was, it's America the beautiful.

It is a magnificent country, and these mountains and these dreams are treasures, national treasures and that we need to care for them and treasure them going forward.

(ethereal music playing) - Thomas Cole created a very particular aesthetic relationship to nature in the American mind where nature is something beautiful to look at and it's a scene.

It's scenery.

It's an aesthetic.

It's something to visually consume and it's not necessarily a place that we are part of.

And it's not a home.

It's more of actually another type of resource which is a visual resource of the beauty and what that says about the national identity of this country.

However, when you look at Thomas Cole's paintings or when you look at a beautiful scene, there's a lot that you don't see in that picture.

And there's a lot that we might not be thinking about when we look aesthetically at American scenery because it obscures the history of how that space was constructed.

(birds singing) - The history of this country is really important to understand in order to understand why we are the way we are now.

- [Devin Lander] 1819, New York becomes larger in population than Virginia.

Certainly by the end of the 19th century, it's known as the Empire State.

In the context of the Empire State, I think you can see the one thing that ties empires together is expansion.

Whether that's done militarily or in economically or in other ways.

- [Renee Barry] What's important to talk about is that empires are not neutral.

Empires are very powerful.

We often talk about New York state as the Empire State as if it's this neutral thing.

And we talk about the beginning of this nation and the time when Thomas Cole was representing the aesthetic, the scenery of this country, it was at a very serious moment in history of active erasure and active dispossession of Indigenous lands.

- The things that Thomas Cole left out are really telling.

So for example, in a lot of his paintings you'll see a lone Native American figure and the figure's depicted as a warrior, wild, in nature, a kind of a wandering, lone soul.

Whereas in reality, there were villages and towns and the Native Americans had an entire developed civilization that is never shown.

He's perpetuating a myth that we still think about today.

I find it so interesting that that has been implanted in our heads, this lone Native figure wandering in the woods, a warrior, wild, uncivilized.

It was all a myth.

- Thomas Cole's paintings fit into this American environmental ideal which has usually focused on outdoor recreation and personal growth from those who get to enjoy leisure, and for those who get to enjoy outdoor recreation and tourism.

- [Devin Lander] Despite the history being complex, and if we think about empire and we think about things like the Indian Removal Act and Indigenous people's displacement, we also start to think about and realize that New York was a slave state.

And that gradual emancipation wasn't actually fully enacted until 1827.

During this era, while there was change all around the United States, most of the change was happening in New York and it was the center of this political thought and reform movements and all of these things happening.

They were happening in New York.

They weren't happening necessarily in other places.

- [Elizabeth Jacks] One of the things that we are addressing through this site in terms of the most urgent social issues, the most urgent educational issues, is the fact that America was built by a very big, diverse population.

And one of the things that we noticed going back and in our interpretation is that people came away with a misunderstanding.

They thought that Thomas Cole, this one man did everything here.

We were talking about him so much, they thought he did the gardens and cooked the food and took care of the house and washed the windows and created all this art.

Of course, that was impossible.

So the only way that he could make his art was that there was an entire civilization of people here of all different races and genders who were supporting him and enabling him to do his work.

So it really took a huge household to make that art happen.

It's only by looking through the past that we can then see that's why we are the way we are now.

It traces back the roots of our conflicts of our understanding of ourselves, of the myths that we still hold and think about ourselves, and when you look back at where that originated, how that got started, it really helps you understand everything that you do and say with your friends, with your politicians, everywhere.

(ethereal music continues) - [Narrator] Sponsored in part by Albany Medical Health Systems and by Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi.

(music continues)