For the first time since Denver Botanic Gardens opened in 1951, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened in 1961, the two institutions will join forces.

LACMA will lend 17 paintings for an exhibition titled “Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art” in the DBG galleries on the York Street campus from June 7 through Sept. 14.

The paintings include artworks by household-name Impressionists such as Childe Hassam and Mary Cassatt.

“LACMA has a great collection, and what I love about temporary exhibitions is that they are ephemeral. You never know when a certain selection of works will be coming together as friends,” said the Garden’s Director of Exhibitions, Art & Learning Engagement and Head Curator of Art Lisa M.W. Eldred.

LACMA’s Associate Curator of American Art Shannon Vittoria curated the show. In her role in Los Angeles slightly longer than a year, Vittoria previously served as assistant curator of American and Painting at Drawing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MOMA) in New York City. She earned her doctorate in American art.

Vittoria noted that she derived the show’s title “Blue Grass, Green Skies” from a New York Tribune column published in 1886, a commentary about the French Impressionists. At the time, Impressionism was not yet widely popular. The review noted the “crazy quilt” paintings “only distinguished by such eccentricities as blue grass, violently green skies, and water with the coloring of a rainbow. In short, it has been said that the paintings of this school are utterly and absolutely worthless. We do not find them so.”

“The American West shaped Impressionism,” said Vittoria. “It is key to note a local and regional school of Colorado Impressionism, but we don’t have those works in our collection.”

What they do have are paintings depicting California landscapes that, Eldred noted, could very well pass for Colorado scenes. Additionally, the exhibit in Denver will shed some limelight upon the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs, which helped train artists in the American West.

“Artists were interested in traveling through and working in Colorado due to our landscapes and our abundant sunshine,” Eldred said.

Along with landscapes, the show includes vital urban scenes and exquisite interiors.

Art Bridges Foundation supports the show

The collaboration between DBG and LACMA is funded, in large part, by the Art Bridges Foundation. The foundation is an offshoot of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, founded by Alice Walton — an heiress to the Walmart fortune who reportedly has donated more than $5 billion to charities.

With a mission to “educate, inspire, and deepen engagement with local audiences,” Walton’s Art Bridges Foundation lends American art to museums of all sizes across the nation and provides financial and strategic support “to get art out of storage and into communities.”

“It’s our mission at LACMA to work with institutions to show our large collections of American art — a lot of which is in storage,” Vittoria said. “We think through ways to take work from the collection and create modestly sized exhibitions we started showing through a program called Local Access. Now, with partner institutions, we send shows of American art from any time period or medium. Art Bridges supports exhibitions traveling nationally, and this is the first show we sent on the road as part of a larger tour.”

An exhibit shown across the country

“Blue Grass, Green Skies” opened in August at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, then showed at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Conn., and after Denver will return to California to the Lancaster Museum of Art and History in Lancaster and the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside.

“The work Art Bridges does across the nation to make American art accessible and seen is pushing museums to reconsider how they share and make artwork available rather that keeping a large majority of artworks hidden in storage,” Eldred said. “By partnering with different institutions and putting together meaningful exhibitions and selections of works and helping to make art accessible to venues, they’re also a catalyst for multifaceted programming.”

How Denver Botanic Gardens cultivates the exhibit

DBG will add a host of programs and activities to personalize the exhibition for the Mile High City audience.

“Something fun we’re doing outdoors is installing five or six large gold frames to highlight our own gardens as composition,” said Eldred. “We’re creating selfie stations by the Monet Pool waterscape, the Plains Garden overlooking Gates Pond, in the Japanese Garden, and by El Pomar Waterway to help people think of our gardens as composition in the outdoors. Framing the views will help people notice and consider color and design elements of horticulture and landscape architecture.”

Eldred added: “We hope people will come in the morning then come back at a different time of day, find a bench and think about the synergy between the paintings in the exhibit and the natural spaces at the gardens.”

Eldred invites visitors to linger indoors in the galleries with paintings in the exhibition. Her curatorial intention is to inspire visitors to cherish Colorado’s landscapes in a new way.

“We’re adding great furniture in the galleries for people to sit and look at the paintings while relaxing,” Eldred said. “We’ll have books they can read and large-print and Braille and verbal descriptions to make the exhibit accessible.”

“The art does offer the opportunity to — through paintings instead of photography on our cell phones — capture a moment or landscape or shadow. The artworks invite conversation. I hope people ask ‘What’s happening?’ and then pause to admire the beautiful natural landscapes we have around us,” she said.

“Too often we are zooming by a painting we could spend time with,” Eldred added. “Here in Colorado, we are spoiled and fortunate to have a range of ecosystems and landscapes. I want to make a correlation between pausing to explore paintings and going outside —  whether it’s here at DBG or in the neighborhood or foothills or mountains — to really consider what’s around us that’s visually interesting, to consider light and shadow and visual forms enriching us and restoring us.”

Vittoria noted that a number of the Impressionist painters also were devoted gardeners.

“One who is featured in the show is John Henry Twachtman, who painted the extraordinary, beautiful work, ‘Harbor Scene,’” Vittoria said. “He lived in Glouster, Mass., where he was an avid gardener and had a home in Greenwich, Conn., and artists often gathered there.”

Eldred emphasized that the exhibit also provided the opportunity to discuss the history of gardens in the U.S.

“We talk about the growing gardening movement around the same time, when commuter gardens moved away from formal-looking European gardens toward more native plants and wildflowers with more wilding in and around homes,” Eldred said.

“It’s wonderful of LACMA not only to share these works from their holdings, but to share their expertise and put together the core of the interpretation and organization,” Eldred said. “For us here at Denver Botanic Gardens, this exhibit is elevating some of the garden landscape components relevant to us.”

For more information on “Blue Grass, Green Skies” visit dbg.org.