Burlington Bay, c. 1850 by Theodore Hopkins. (Image courtesy of the Fleming Museum)

As Margaret Tamulonis and Aimee Marcereau DeGalan guide me through the Fleming Museum's "Beckoning Country" exhibit, the co-curators of the show point out particular favorites among the artworks and objects. But as we walk through galleries structured around Earth, Water, Flora, and Fauna, their greatest enthusiasm isn't so much for individual pieces as for the connections among them.

A sixteenth-century dugout canoe made of white pine is adjacent to a painting of Vergennes Falls, where British ship builders used the same towering native tree to construct their masts. A familiar Charles Louis Heyde painting of Mount Mansfield shows the effects of logging on the landscape; it's flanked by furniture that, in theory, could have been crafted from the felled trees. Cyrenius Hall's landscape from Keeler's Bay in South Hero depicts a small flock of merino sheep. It shares a wall with two of Lewis Hine's stark photographs of mill workers, and in the corner hangs a blue wool state militia uniform. Agricultural commodity, labor, and product united.

"Objects speak to other objects in the room," says Marcereau DeGalan. "You wouldn't get that if it was just a straight painting show. Because of the difference in media, some of the dialogues that result are really rich."

While obvious inspiration for the exhibition comes from this summer's 400th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain's first journey down the lake that would bear his name, the show also traces its approach to a less likely source. In summer 2007, the Fleming hosted an Honors College symposium designed to help faculty learn about the museum as a teaching resource. For a final assignment in the symposium, Walter Poleman, senior lecturer in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, dug into the museum's attic for an unusual visual aid. He found a nineteenth-century top hat made of beaver felt (included in the current show) to ground a lesson on ecological impact: fashion craze pushes fur trade pushes landscape change.

Similar connections of land and object drove the show's Earth, Water, Flora, Fauna organizing principle. The Champlain Valley is celebrated not only for the art it has inspired, but also for the objects that have emerged directly from it.

"We were looking for an almost democratic way of looking at the material," Tamulonis says. "We wanted to include fine arts, historical materials, decorative arts, anthropological materials... The vision was to have all of them in the room together, figuring out that structure through landscape."

Glimpses of the University of Vermont's past are abundant in the "Beckoning Country" show. The College Building, fire-doomed forerunner of the Old Mill, appears in paintings on an ornate clock and a chair from the early nineteenth century. One of the first objects a visitor encounters is a humble enough looking piece, a trowel that wouldn't look out of place on the antique tool table at the Waterbury Flea Market. But it's got good bloodlines, the trowel was used by Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette as he did the honors of laying the cornerstone of Old Mill. A commanding painting depicting one of Vermont's signature granite quarries is a Fleming favorite, the work of Francis Colburn '34, longtime UVM art professor.

The Vermont landscape is, of course, on ample display. Central as tourism is to Vermont's economy these days, it's tough to imagine a time when the state was spurned by those seeking scenic beauty. But the Hudson River School painters and other artists in search of the sublime preferred the crags of the White Mountains or the Catskills to Vermont's "green hills." Sanford Robinson Gifford began to change that in the 1860s with paintings such as a view of Lake Champlain as seen from the peak of Mount Mansfield. Exhibited in New York City, his Vermont landscapes drew rave reviews, the attention of other painters, and potential travelers who soon began to look to the Green Mountain State.

A fifteen-foot long Abenaki dugout canoe is likely the most imposing single object in the "Beckoning Country" show. Margaret Tamulonis says she envisioned the canoe, part of the UVM Anthropology Department collection, as part of the exhibit since early in the planning stages. The Abenaki kept dugouts on the shorelines of lakes and ponds throughout the Champlain Valley. The one on display at the Fleming, made from a single tree trunk of white pine, was among four canoes found by archaeologists in Shelburne Pond in 1978. In a show linked to the Champlain quadrecentennial, the canoe is something of the exhibit equivalent of a movie prequel — a strong reminder of the people who were in the region long before Samuel de Champlain ever set sail.

"A Beckoning Country: Art and Objects from the Lake Champlain Valley" is on display through Sept. 20.