Inspired by the arrival of "Ansel Adams" in the Gund Gallery, we mined the riches of our collection of works on paper for prints, photographs, watercolors, and drawings that convey different visions of the Western landscape and its inhabitants—native peoples, gold miners, migrants, and movie stars. This selection of more than one hundred works—recent acquisitions as well as a few loans—created between 1800 and the present day, evokes the realities and myths of the West, its “dust and dreams.”

Artists as diverse as George Catlin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Moran, and John Marin responded to the life and lands west of the Mississippi. Native American images range from nineteenth-century examples by Kiowa Apache artist Huangooah (Silver Horn), to recent work by Fritz Scholder and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

Yosemite Valley, where Ansel Adams was resident photographer, is represented in several media, from Carleton Watkins’s sublime mammoth plate photographs of the 1880s, to modernist watercolors painted by William and Marguerite Zorach in 1920.

Take a trip to the Trustman Galleries and experience the glory, pathos, and humor of the American West for yourself.