Glen Arbor Arts Center observes the Nation’s Semiquincentennial with American Tree

Photo: Denis and Martha Pierce bought Ralph Nunez’s “Tree of Life” sculpture.

By Katie Dunn

Sun contributor

The story of America is most often told through its defining figures—the echo of Paul Revere’s ride; George Washington at the nation’s founding; Abraham Lincoln, who preserved the Union; Susan B. Anthony and the suffrage movement that broadened the meaning of citizenship; Martin Luther King Jr., whose vision of nonviolent resistance reshaped the American conscience; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose jurisprudence recast the boundaries of equality; and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon which expanded not only American possibility, but human possibility itself.

It is a narrative built through individuals—through action, ideology, and achievement—each marking a different chapter in the nation’s unfolding identity.

But America is also defined by place: the rocky edge of Boston Harbor, the vast pull of the Great Plains, the carved immensity of the Grand Canyon, the red-brick solidity of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Gateway Arch rising over St. Louis, the sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge, the volcanic peaks of Hawaii. Together, these sites form a parallel geography of meaning, where history is anchored in landscape and monument.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, that layered story of people and place comes into sharper focus. Across the country, this milestone is being marked through ceremony, exhibitions, and public celebration, as communities revisit the question of what it means to inhabit—and be formed by—this history.

Some of the nation’s most prominent art institutions are, in varied and distinct ways, returning to a central inquiry: how to understand and reexamine on the 250 years since the founding of the United States and the interwoven history that has accumulated across that time.

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, A Nation of Artists traces more than three centuries of creative expression, emphasizing the depth and diversity that have informed American art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Revolution! examines the nation’s origins, treating the Revolutionary era not as a singular narrative but as a complex and contested period seen through a wide range of perspectives and voices. The Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Containing Multitudes borrows from Walt Whitman to explore the contradictions embedded in American life, using photography to interpret a country inflected by plurality. And at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Dear America: Artists Explore the American Experience gathers more than a hundred works on paper spanning roughly 250 years, considering how artists have engaged with the nation’s landscapes, its people, and its evolving ideas of freedom.

Set against this backdrop, the Glen Arbor Arts Center (GAAC) is responding with American Tree. The exhibition contemplates the role trees played in the formation of the United States 250 years ago—and the role they will continue to play as the nation moves into its next 250 years.

Under the curatorial direction of Sarah Bearup-Neal, GAAC gallery manager, the exhibition reframes the Semiquincentennial through living systems of time and growth. In contrast to the scale and institutional sweep of national exhibitions, GAAC’s approach sharpens the lens, asking what it means to understand America not as an archive of individuals, events, and places, but as a living ecology—rooted and continually growing.

For Bearup-Neal, American Tree originated with considerations of stories and elements typically omitted from the Semiquincentennial narrative.

“When I started thinking about how to wrangle the upcoming anniversary into an exhibition idea, I began to wonder about the stories that aren’t usually told,” she says, pointing to the way “trees and forests… were intrinsic to the nation’s formation,” and how they were often understood as “a consumable ‘resource,’ best viewed as a commercial product there for the benefit of the people trying to create the United States.” That perspective, she suggests, has not disappeared, but continues to reverberate “in so many ways.”

That curatorial framework carried into the selection process itself. Paula Jo Kemler, Glen Arborite and member of the GAAC Exhibition Committee, served as juror for American Tree. She describes being impressed by the range of materials and approaches, as well as the ways artists returned to the subject from unexpected directions. As juror, Kemler understood her role not as narrowing the field, but as shaping a body of work capable of holding variation and shifting perspectives.

“This show celebrates trees. Many pieces showcase the deep connections people have to trees, some featuring trees that the artist has a personal connection to, as if the tree is more than a part of a landscape and is perhaps beloved. Other works highlight industry and trees, either as producing a commodity, like fruit trees, or as the commodity itself. All works provide viewers with opportunities to wonder,” she shares.

American Tree features work by 28 artists drawn primarily from the local and regional community. Collectively, they represent a wide spectrum of artistic media, including sculpture, collage, mixed media, photography, tapestry weaving, drawing, printmaking, and painting.

Among the participating artists are several deeply respected and long-standing members of the Glen Arbor arts community—figures whose creative practice has helped articulate its cultural fabric. Their presence is both grounding and affirming: Claudia Buchmann, Margo Burian, Nik Burkhart, Royce Deans, Cynthia Greig, Bonnie Gonzales, David Marks, Joan Richmond, Angela Saxon, and David Westerfield.

Opening Night

June 5 marked the opening night of American Tree, which drew a steady, engaged crowd throughout the evening. The exhibition felt expansive in scope, defined less by a single stylistic throughline than by the individuality of the artists involved. Across the gallery, a range of interpretations, materials, and approaches spoke to the theme in distinct ways, with each piece standing on its own while contributing to a broader shared inquiry.

Among those in attendance were Martha and Denis Pierce, Glen Arborites and avowed supporters of the arts, who marveled at the abundance of the creativity on view. Denis described the exhibition as filled with “many friends of the art center and a few of the artists,” noting the energy of the room and the openness of the artists themselves in discussing their work. He pointed to the way the theme of American Tree extended beyond what is immediately visible above ground, with works also considering “the significant features of trees below ground.”

Moved by what they encountered, the Pierces acquired Tree of Life, a wooden sculpture crafted of walnut by Michigan artist Ralph Nunez. The piece, Nunez says, draws on ancient iconography that “represents interconnectedness, family, ancestry, fertility, and vitality.”

Awards

As with any juried exhibition, a number of works were recognized with awards. Carolyn Swift’s Flux (Windy) received Best of Show. The large mixed-media relief and collage work incorporates woodcut and relief printing, collagraph, acrylic ink, paint, and colored pencil. The piece addresses the ecological and philosophical relationship between humans and forests, challenging utilitarian views of nature as resource. Instead, Swift points to a deeper, long-standing human connection to forests as sources of beauty, knowledge, well-being, and humility.

Tina Vivian’s Way Leads on to Way, which received the Marjorie Sonner Hughes Award for Creative Excellence, is a mixed-media work incorporating watercolor, ink, etching, relief prints, acrylic, and various papers. The piece draws its title from Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken and imagines the American tree as a walk through the woods—fragmented, resilient, and ultimately beautiful, “much like America herself,” she states.

Merit awards were also presented to Cathryn Amidei for Spire; Royce Deans for Over, Under, Through; Lynne Rae Perkins for Memory of Treetops; and Lisa Marie Yontz for A Growing Family.

Cindi Ford’s Holding On—also recognized with a merit award—arises from a deeply personal rupture: the removal of a cherished tree from her yard in Rapid City. The work, composed of mokuhanga, engraving, stencils, stamping, and monotype printmaking, turns that loss into a larger meditation on endurance. Ford describes trees as lasting metaphors for human experience: they “grow, flourish under good conditions, some survive under tough conditions,” mirroring human resilience. While working on the piece, she recalls encountering a recent photograph of her young granddaughter wearing an American flag sweater, an image she describes as entering the print during its development. That unexpected visual presence reframed the work, intertwining personal memory with broader national symbolism—what she calls “holding on the hope, our country, the American tree.” Ford ultimately describes the piece as “a visual poem set in the sky.”

Notable Submissions

Inevitably, given the breadth of work on view, it is not possible to give each artist and piece the attention it deserves. That limitation is not a reflection of the work itself, but rather a testament to the strength and depth of the exhibition. In many ways, it reinforces the point: American Tree is a show that resists summary. It insists instead on direct experience—on the act of moving through the space, pausing, looking closely, and forming connections of one’s own.

Within this context, these works emerged as entry points into American Tree’s broader themes and core concerns.

In Pier Pressure, David Marks reflects on the long environmental and industrial history embedded in landscape. Taken last fall in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the photographic image centers on a series of weathered wooden pilings extending into water, which he interprets as carrying deeper historical weight. “The piers symbolize the thousands of trees burned for the iron ore industry at the turn of the century. They stand as sentinels defining our history,” he shares. Drawn to the American Tree theme through what he calls a “lifelong love of nature and the outdoors,” he explains that, as a landscape photographer, he already had “an archive of images that would fit this concept perfectly.” Within the broader exhibition exploring 250 years of trees in America, Pier Pressure frames them as record and residue. He hopes viewers “can appreciate my images and relate to the beauty of nature,” especially the idea that many of these trees “will be around for generations to enjoy long after I am gone.”

Angela Saxon’s monotype prints Habitat and Forest Light approach the forest from two vantage points—one intimate, the other immersive. In Habitat, a white-breasted nuthatch perches among branches and leaves—a quiet, contained scene that conveys Saxon’s awareness that “the forest isn’t my home… it belongs to others.” In contrast, Forest Light dissolves into layered color and shifting marks, evoking light filtering through trees rather than depicting them directly. Saxon describes her artistic approach as rooted in close engagement with the landscape, noting: “My practice has always included a focus on our compelling forests. I spend a lot of time hiking and working from nature… I’m a painter of the natural world specifically because I live here. It’s my muse.”

The Tree as Recurring Form

Throughout the centuries, artists have returned to the tree as a source of visual and symbolic significance. In Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s (1598-1680) Apollo and Daphne, Daphne transforms into a laurel tree as she escapes Apollo’s pursuit, her figure shifting into bark and branching limbs at the edge of metamorphosis. Gustav Klimt’s (1862-1918) The Tree of Life, Stoclet Frieze renders nature as ornament and cosmology, its spiraling branches cast in gold as a diagram of continuity and mortality. Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude’s (1935-2009) Wrapped Trees temporarily obscure and alter living forms through fabric, reframing trees as sculptural presence.

With David Hockney’s (1937-2026) The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire—a series of iconic iPad drawings made en plein air—the tree becomes an ongoing act of observation, recorded as light and weather shift through time. Andy Goldsworthy’s (b. 1956) Wood Line engages fallen branches of eucalyptus trees as part of an ephemeral landscape sculpture, assembling them into forms designed to return to the earth. Wolf Kahn’s (1927-2020) Glen extends the tree as both subject and structure into saturated color and luminous abstraction, where landscape dissolves into atmosphere and glow.

As Hockney has observed, “Trees are the largest manifestation of the life-force we see.” Across these works, that idea is underscored.

Alignment: American Tree and Glen Arbor as Tree City USA

GAAC’s American Tree exhibition coincides with Glen Arbor’s designation as a Tree City USA community, a fitting local parallel to the show’s focus. The Arbor Day Foundation award acknowledges communities that meet national standards for tree care and stewardship, including formal tree programs, protective ordinances, and ongoing investment in maintaining and preserving the urban forest.

Resident horticulturalist Chris Skellenger situates the role of trees in shaping northern Michigan’s landscape not only as symbolism, but as a record of human settlement and environmental endurance. “Trees in a place like Glen Arbor represent the interface between human impact and environmental preservation… I think for the most part the settlers realized that the presence of trees meant that they stood a chance of carving a life out for themselves in that area,” he explains.

Community Programming

American Tree runs through August 13 and is accompanied by four public programs: Leelanau’s Old Growth Forests: Living History on June 13, where Becky Hill of the Leelanau Conservancy led a discussion about protecting forest ecosystems; Exhibition Walk + Talk with Bearup-Neal on June 21 and July 25; and Woodland Home: A History of a Place on August 1, where two forest stewards will discuss the ecology and character of Northern Michigan’s woodlands.