Faculty
Suzie Oppenheimer
BA, Smith College. MA, Courtauld Institute of Art. MPhil, PhD Candidate, The
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Specializes in 19th and 20th-century art of North and South America, with a focus on waterscapes, the blue humanities, hemispheric art history, and maritime aesthetics in painting, prints, and visual culture. Her forthcoming dissertation argues that the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean served as a visual and material conduit for practitioners to explore shifting relations between the United States and the Caribbean circa 1840–1940. Before coming to Sarah Lawrence, she taught throughout the CUNY colleges and held curatorial positions at the American Folk Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum. Her research has been supported by the Yale Center for British Art, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, among others. SLC, 2026–
Undergraduate Courses 2026-2027
Art History
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Open, Seminar—Fall
ARTH 3104
Although 19th-century art in the United States encompassed a wide range of stylistic movements––Impressionism, Realism, Romanticism, Tonalism, the Hudson River School, and Folk Art, among them––many artists shared a common fascination: water. Dangerous oceans, seductive shorelines, and industrial man-made waterways emerged as recurring subjects. While artists used images of maritime scenes to negotiate new understandings of the bounds of a new nation, water also offered possibilities for visualizing a fluid, borderless world that could connect regions, religions, ecosystems, and temporalities. Drawing on the emerging field of the Blue Humanities—an interdisciplinary approach that explores the cultural and historical significance of water—this seminar will examine how artists represented seas, rivers, ports, and coastal environments. Adding to traditional narratives of American art, we will explore how artists used waterways to examine the US’ relationship to Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central and South America. Topics will include painted waterscapes, port scenes, and ship portraits, including Childe Hassam’s impressionist dedication to fixing the “moment” long-traveling waters touched New England shores, Winslow Homer’s realist interpretation of transoceanic migration and inequity, and Fitz H. Lane’s romantic rendering of US ships triumphing over perilous, international seas. Our discussions will be augmented by attending to diverse makers working outside of traditional fine art, including within the material cultures of maritime trade, from pearls to shell souvenirs and carved whalebone; folk depictions of mariners and their relationship to constructions of race, gender, and sexuality at sea; popular visual cultures of enslavement, migration, and displacement across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds; military representations of naval warfare, imperialism, and resistance; and print illustrations of technologies that transformed global mobility, including steamships, canals, and underwater telegraph cables. Through artworks, readings, and museum visits in New York City and the Hudson River Valley, students will engage with historical and contemporary scholarship on water, fluidity, mobility, and interconnectedness. Together, we will investigate the history of 19th-century art from the perspective of the oceans, rivers, and waterways that linked artists to the wider world.
Faculty