Art History
Virtual exhibition—a speculative and exploratory exhibition project. Students imagined an exhibition that engages with the topic of art and environment.
ARTH 226: Art and Environment
About the course: This course explores the changing relationship between artistic approaches to the environment and other forms of knowledge and practice, including scientific knowledge and social activism. Students will reflect on the way the environment is experienced and imagined within art historical and interdisciplinary debates, and conduct original research in the field. It directly engages with the challenges of climate change and the environmental transformations of the Anthropocene as recorded and documented and reflected in art. We look closely at art that documents the transforming multispecies worlds of humans, nature, and the planet. We think about how these artworks perform and record complex histories of planetary destruction and shaping. And in particular, we think about how art contributes to, rather than simply reflects, our understanding of the world of non-art things—in particular the ongoing impacts of humans as a geological force.
Course coordinator: Professor Susan Ballard
Assessment details: Virtual exhibition—This is a speculative and exploratory exhibition project. You should imagine an exhibition that engages with the topic of art and environment. Your exhibition must include at least 8 and no more than 12 artworks. These can be from any historical or contemporary time frame. Your exhibition can be based on topics and artworks used in annotated bibliography and case study.
Student work
Maddie Brooks Gillespie
The course as a whole has been a beautiful and thought-provoking experience, as we learned to use art to think deeper about our relationships with the environment. I decided to focus on the field of Multispecies Studies, and this exhibition examines the complex world of plant/people relationships. Learning to think about art in a digital world, especially as the Humanities looks for new ways of sharing information in a post-Covid world, felt like a valuable real-world experience.
https://www.theartofregeneration.online