ARTH 062. Land Art, Place, and Environment

(Cross-listed as ENVS 053)
As climate change brings about the breakdown of global ecological systems, humanity is faced with the urgent need to evaluate our place in those systems and reckon with our impact as agents of change. Art has long been a site through which societies have visually and materially expressed and explored their relationships to nature, both as a cultural-aesthetic construction and as a real site inhabited by human and non-human beings. This course will examine the changing nature of land, place, and environment in modern and contemporary art and its representation and deployment as a genre, theme, and medium over the last half-century, with special attention to the Eastern Woodlands as an ancestral and contested site. Approaching diverse art forms such as earthworks, painting, photography, installation art, and site-specificity from ecocritical and decolonial art historical lenses, we will consider "nature" as a cultural-aesthetic construction and as a politically embattled site inhabited by human and non-human agents and beings. With select local site and collection visits, we will examine the role of [the] E/earth in art as material, vibrant matter, pigment, place, and collective home of social, cosmological, and ecological relations.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Eligible for ENVS
Spring 2024. Green.
Catalog chapter: Art and Art History: Art History
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/art-history

Access the class schedule to search for sections.

Close Window