Art History 352: Art/Environment

This class will explore contemporary artistic responses to climate change. Whether we call this period “Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene,” “The Sixth Extinction,” or “The Dithering” we are now forced to confront a new era of human-generated global warming and rapidly vanishing biodiversity. How are artists and other cultural producers helping us to rethink and reimagine our relationship to the planet? From the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 70s to more recent experiments in so-called “Third Nature” digital domains, this course will explore how creative individuals and collective actions are helping to envision human adaptability, cross-species justice, and new modes of collaboration to halt—or at least slow—ecological disaster. Likewise, the class will explore how art is often implicated in the same cycle of overconsumption that threatens our shared habitats. Lectures, in-class screenings, guest speakers and fieldtrips will be used to supplement course readings. This is a writing intensive course open to students from all disciplines but rooted in the capacity for the Arts and Humanities to generate creative responses to complex problems. May be taken for credit toward the Art-Environmental Studies major.