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I visited the Haggin recently and was awed by grand 19th-century oil paintings of Yosemite Valley by Albert Bierstadt.

But she finds these sublime, monumental scenes of pristine wilderness by artists like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Asher B. Durand to be as problematic as they are inspirational.

Since receiving its first painting in 1863, a landscape by the Hudson River painter Albert Bierstadt donated by the artist, the institution has been early to acquire works by Henry Moore, Joan Miró, Mark Rothko, Frida Kahlo, Willem de Kooning, Marisol, Andy Warhol and Mark Bradford, among others, amassing a modern and contemporary collection of international renown.

“You wouldn’t expect this regal building containing works by Renoir and Albert Bierstadt in working-class Stockton, but that’s what makes it feel like, literally, a hidden gem. The museum is in Victory Park, which is in a leafy, tidy neighborhood built in the 1920s. Exhibits include works related to Native Americans, the gold rush, ranching and Chinese immigrant life.”

At a time when Black figuration is all the rage and the art market has largely relegated landscape painting to a stodgy past, Gavin is something of a counterintuitive combination: a contemporary artist putting his own spin on a classical form; taking on current issues of history, race and territory but painting in the tradition of the Hudson River School — Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole.