Sense of Place in the Arts

A space becomes a place as we get to know it. As a concept, "place" is an abstraction, but places themselves are tangible and concrete with characteristics that make them unique. We might expect writers and artists to be especially attuned to the spirit of a place. Artists may work to capture the the particularities of a place and to communicate the way a place speaks to them through poetry, prose, photographs, or paintings. Through an artist's work, we see a familar place in a new way, or come to know something about a place we've never visited. In this way, artwork can function as a window, a lens on the world that helps us see a place through another's eye.

For a link to the New York Times article on Hopper's Cape Cod, click

store, a house we once lived in but that is now inhabited by strangers, entire neighborhoods changed by urban renewal—a place once charged with meaning becomes empty for us. A photograph or a painting may serve as a link to our memory of a place, even when the place itself has changed. Corn Hill in Truro, as painted by Hopper in 1930, no longer looks the same. Newer houses that some don't feel fit the landscape have been built there. In a 2011 article in the New York Times, Highland Museum Director Deborah Minsky said, "The sense of these cottages being almost by themselves is gone and lost forever. But as long as that painting exists, there will be people who will know that the Cape once looked like that."

Hopper, Edward. Corn Hill. 1930.

A sense of place is fragile. The place we remember, once so important, can be lost to us. Gertrude Stein's famous line about Oakland, California, ("There's no there there . . .") was not meant as a put-down of Oakland. Instead the phrase expressed the disorientation Stein felt on returning to her childhood home, once such a stable and important place, to find there was nothing familiar, nothing there that still carried meaning for her.

Time works change on all places. A country neighborhood may become suburbanized, a dirt road paved. A seaside cottage may be washed into the sea. In this way, a place we once knew can revert to mere space. An abandoned

HERE.

Finally, a more sardonic view of the changing landscape . . . .