For the past four years Peter Edlund has been researching Algonquian languages and cultures to understand the origin of place names - words that have become an underlying part of our geography, but whose original meanings and sources are lost to us. Edlund has made a study of these places, starting in his native Connecticut and moving through New England and New York. Employing a palate of Prussian blue, he renders the features that gave a place its name. Hilly-Island is a meaning of the Lenape/Algonquian name for the island of Manhattan. In this and other recent paintings, he uses a split-screen approach to juxtapose his conception of an early view with today’s perspective. The location of Trinity Church in lower Manhattan was originally near the shoreline, and is now quite far inland as a result of successive expansions to the island over the past 400 years.

Peter Edlund’s paintings draw from a wide range of artistic and literary sources to reinterpret landscape with a political overlay. Paintings in this place-name series include a commission from The MacDowell Colony to create a public art project for the Town Library in Peterborough, NH, and have been included in No Reservations: Native American History and Culture in Contemporary Art at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. His vibrant Homeland Security paintings, based on Ansel Adams’ WWII photographs of Japanese-American internment camps, were exhibited at Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art, Boston, MA; in Tainted Landscapes at the Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; and were featured in Orion Magazine. Primal Visions: Albert Bierstadt ‘Discovers’ America was exhibited at the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; and The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA. Paintings based on the poems of Emily Dickinson were commissioned for Emily Dickinson Rendered at Wave Hill in 2007, and his Another America and Audubon series’ was exhibited in Verging on Real here in 2001. Edlund is the recipient of grants from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and a Milton Avery Memorial Fellowship.

More information can be found at www.peteredlundart.com