Martha Visser't Hooft (1906-1994)

Martha Visser’t Hooft may have been lamenting the loss of grasslands, woods, ponds, and pastures for the construction of a high speed, toll highway when she created Thruway-Batavia in 1958. Part of her series Eastern Landscapes (1958-1972), the ink drawing on delicate rice, or Japan, paper, accentuates the sense that our green landscape has vanished, remaining only as a memory. The New York State Thruway opened four years earlier, on June 24, 1954, as a multi-lane system of controlled-access, state-wide highways spanning 569.83 miles. It connected urban and rural areas as automobile and truck transportation accelerated as the primary means of commuting and hauling goods. Visser’t Hooft continued for several decades to bemoan environmental pollution—foretelling the dangers that still plague us today.