Reading a Haunted Landscape: A Land Education/Art Inquiry of Mining Remains in Key Placer, Colorado

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Histories, Museum Studies, and Postfoundational Thought (Table 5)

Abstract

This land education/land art inquiry focuses on mining remains in the mountains of central Colorado. In the early 1900s, a hydraulic placer mining company dug miles of deep ditches and blasted and/or dug numerous mining test pits into the land . This inquiry is partly about reading the ghost forest created by these deformations and the subsequent art that people have made decorating the test pits. The test pits already resemble vulvas, but the art people have created makes them even more so. The methodology employed is an interdisciplinary walking, looking, and wondering--considering what might be meant by the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, where Indigenous people have been displaced and the land plundered.

Author

• Kate McCoy, SUNY New Paltz