$50,000 gift funds special Adirondack Museum exhibit

BLUE MOUNTAIN LAKE — The Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake has received an anonymous gift in the amount of $50,000 in support of a special exhibition to open this summer.

The new exhibit, "A Wild Unsettled Country: Early Reflections of the

Adirondacks," will open May 22. Paintings, maps, prints, and photographs will illustrate the untamed Adirondack wilderness discovered by the earliest cartographers, artists and photographers.

The new exhibit will showcase more than 40 paintings from the museum's collection, including works by Thomas Cole, John Frederick Kensett, William Havell, and James David Smillie. Engravings and lithographs of Adirondack landscape paintings also will be featured. Prints brought these images to a wider audience and provided many Americans with their first glimpse of the howling wilds that were the Adirondack Mountains.

The exhibit will include photographs — stereo views and albumen prints — sold as tourist souvenirs and for armchair travelers. William James Stillman took the earliest photos in the exhibition in 1859. These rare images are the first photographic landscape studies taken in the Adirondacks.

A dozen significant maps from the collection of the Adirondack Museum's research library will demonstrate the growth of knowledge about the region.

The Adirondack Museum tells the story of the Adirondacks through exhibits, special events, classes for schools and hands-on activities. The museum is in Blue Mountain Lake at Routes 28 North and 30. For more information about the museum's offerings, hours and admission prices, call 1 (518) 352-7311, or visit www.adirondackmuseum.org.