Environmental Art History and Visual Culture

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Reconciling the ecocritical turn in art history with a need to more broadly understand the histories, as well as futures, of our global environment, the field of environmental art history and visual culture is growing. Not only should history make ecological sense, but environmental art history should also contribute to an understanding of present-day environmental concerns. Where the specificity of the environment has often been overlooked in studies of art history and visual culture, environmental art history realigns art historical concerns with environmental realities. With this roundtable we foreground the work of art historians and their visually, geographically, and temporally expansive research in dialogue with the larger field of environmental history.

This roundtable engages in conversation the breadth and wealth of research being undertaken by graduate students and early career researchers from across the US and Canada. In this instance, thinking environmentally about art history ranges from nineteenth-century Methodist periodicals communicating the Arctic as a land of exploration and settlement to the ways in which artists and cultural practitioners in Oceania and its diaspora critically engage with intersecting settler colonial legacies and current environmental issues in the Pacific. This roundtable also introduces work on the visual and material history of silver in nineteenth-century photography, mining stock certificates, and the stock market, alongside the visual representation of Indigenous creation stories relating to the sky in the blown-glass artwork of living artist Joe Feddersen and the coastal cartographies, racial geographies, and archipelagic landscapes apparent in the visual cultures of nineteenth and twentieth century America.

Foregrounding the interdisciplinarity of art history and visual culture, we hope this roundtable will revitalize discussions around art in environmental history and actively encourage environmental historians and humanists to intentionally engage with artwork and visual media, not simply as illustrations but as important and necessary primary sources.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Chair

• Isabelle Gapp, University of Aberdeen

Moderator

• Chris Slaby, William & Mary

Presenters

• Rachel Allen, University of Delaware

• Monica Bravo, Princeton University

• Nyssa Komorowski, University of Toronto

• Kimia Shahi, University of Southern California

• Maggie Wander, University of California, Santa Cruz