Bringing Light and Color to Crater Lake

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the law creating Crater Lake National Park. It was the fifth of now over sixty national parks in the United States. In commemoration of Oregon’s only national park, the Oregon Historical Society designed an original exhibition, Creating a Masterpiece: Artists and the Origins of Crater Lake National Park(on view from November 20, 2026, to January 9, 2028), and published the Oregon Historical Quarterly's Fall 2026 special issue, entitled “Crater Lake and Artistic Imagination.” Together, these productions tell the story of how nineteenth-century landscape painters brought Crater Lake to regional and national audiences and influenced its national park designation. In this program, exhibition curators Megan Lallier-Barron and Peter Boag share the inspiration and research behind the exhibition and discuss how — through everything from historic paintings and photographs to museum objects and QR codes — they have made the story available to a modern audience.