The Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain opens for the season on May 24 with two new exhibitions, “Great Wilderness, Great Expectations: Masterworks from the Adirondack Museum” and “Traveling with Stoddard.”

“These exhibitions will be a special opportunity for visitors to view rarely seen treasures, including paintings, photographs and sketchbooks, from notable Adirondack-inspired artists, past and present,” said the museum’s Jessica Rubin.

According to Rubin, “’Great Wilderness, Great Expectations’ celebrates our relationship with nature and wilderness by featuring more than 120 paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs-some never or only rarely exhibited before. Depicting the Adirondack landscape over a span of two centuries, these masterworks from the museum’s permanent collection-together with quotes from Adirondackers past and present-explore the many ways the region has been portrayed by artists, photographers, and writers from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Their images and words have shaped the changing ways in which people expected to interact with nature when coming to the Adirondacks to find meaning in the wilderness, far from the workaday world.”

‘Great Wilderness’ was organized by the museum’s Chief Curator, Laura Rice, with assistance from Executive Director Emerita Caroline Welsh. Among the artists represented are: Thomas Cole, John Frederick Kensett, William Trost Richards, Seneca Ray Stoddard, Edward Bierstadt, Harold Weston, Eliot Porter, and Nathan Farb.

The exhibit includes rarely or never before seen artists’ sketchbooks and examples of Adirondack photographs, among them, large format 19th century albumen prints by Seneca Ray Stoddard. New acquisitions, including a painting by William Trost Richards, will hang in the galleries for the first time.

"Schroon Lake" by Thomas Cole

More than any other Adirondack photographer, Seneca Ray Stoddard (1843-1917) shaped and perpetuated a popular image of the Adirondack Mountains as wilderness. But he also captured the social side of tourism, photographing stagecoaches loaded with people and baggage, gatherings of the American Canoe Association and outdoor picnics, Even armchair travelers could follow along the tour by way of the hundreds of stereo-views Stoddard printed of popular tourist sites and hotels.

In addition to photographs, ‘Traveling with Stoddard’ Includes maps, sales albums, paintings, sketches, and excerpts from his guidebooks and magazine articles.

New events this season include an Aqua Fest on July 20, which will celebrate the region’s waterways and provide programs for all ages. Aqua Fest will be held in conjunction with Governor Cuomo’s July 21 Adirondack Challenge. A variety of workshops, with topics ranging from stained glass to basket making to song writing, are also scheduled throughout the season. For more information, call 352-7311.