This Exhibit Examines Nature and Environmental Justice in Three Centuries of American Art

By Patrick Rogers
The fact that nature and nation share a common root—the Latin verb nasci, "to be born"—might rate as trivia to most people. But in the context of early American art, at least, the connection has profound cultural meaning. Paintings of natural vistas, from New York's Hudson Valley to the purple mountains and red deserts of the West, became early symbols of a young nation and its so-called manifest destiny. In the minds of many early Americans and pioneers, the land was out there for "us" (as in, men of European decent) to celebrate—but also to conquer. The very idea of American civilization meant destroying some of those beautiful, natural vistas to build the cities, farms, and factories of the future.
That is just one of the contradictions set up—and rapidly deconstructed—in a sweeping reappraisal of American art seen through the lenses of environmental justice and the emerging theory of ecocriticism now on view at the Princeton University Art Museum. First developed in the 1990s as a cultural inquiry into the nature writings of Henry David Thoreau and others, ecocriticism has expanded into the study of the ecological significance of visual art, music, architecture, and other creative fields.
Albert Bierstadt, Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite, ca. 1871-73North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh
In Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment, museum curator Karl Kusserow and Alan Braddock, a professor of art history and American studies at the College of William and Mary, play with the meaning of more than 100 paintings and objects from the Colonial period to the present day. With fresh research and interpretations, the exhibit peels back traditional views of early American art to raise questions about colonialism, racial and ethnic representation, pollution, and humanity's ethical responsibilities to nature.
The free exhibition starts off with the juxtaposition of Albert Bierstadt's Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite, an iconic 19th-century Romantic landscape, and Valerie Hegarty's 2007 Fallen Bierstadt, a facsimile of the same painting. Bierstadt, who visited Yosemite Valley in the 1860s, described it as America's Garden of Eden and depicted it as a divine creation untouched by human hands. In Hegarty's version, however, the painting has been slashed and burned, with its missing pieces sitting on the floor below. Hegarty, a visual artist based in Brooklyn, sullies Bierstadt's scene in ways similar to how humans have damaged the environment, and in so doing, she skewers the antiquated notion of nature as sublime and beyond our reach. "She literally dematerializes that vision of nature to suggest it's not necessarily the only vision," said Kusserow.
Valerie Hegarty, Fallen Bierstadt, 2007© Valerie Hegarty. Photo from the Brooklyn Museum
The exhibit's intention, however, is not to deny or disparage the power of artists like Bierstadt to shape prevailing views of the environment. Bierstadt's popularity in the late 1800s helped encourage the creation of California's first state parks and the launch of modern conservationism. Take, for example, the large-format 2002 photograph Caribou Migration I by Subhankar Banerjee, which captures a vast section of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as seen from an airplane overhead. Single-file lines of barely discernible female caribou cross the icy landscape on their way to calving grounds to the north.
The image has a quiet, peaceful quality to it but caused an uproar back in 2003 during the second Bush administration. As the Indian-born photographer was preparing a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute, he became caught up in the political fight over Arctic drilling when a congresswoman displayed the caribou image on the House floor to counter claims that the refuge was a frozen wasteland. Suddenly, Banerjee's major exhibition at the government-run museum was downsized to a gallery in the basement, an act that some saw as censorship. The move galvanized activism against drilling the Arctic, and Banerjee's photograph is now an icon of the environmental movement.
Caribou Migration I by Subhankar BanerjeeCollection Lannan Foundation © Subhankar Banerjee
Nature's Nation also zooms in on the production of some earlier American works of art, such as a chest of drawers by Philadelphia cabinetmakers circa 1761. The exhibit presents the highboy of tulip poplar, white cedar, and imported mahogany as an artifact of exploitation. As the museum commentary explains, this gleaming mahogany, meant to embellish an elite Colonial-era home, was probably harvested in Jamaica or Central America by enslaved Africans living in cruel and deplorable conditions. In a short amount of time, loggers cleared much of the region's tropical forests, along with the wildlife they supported. The land then became sugar plantations, where once again slaves suffered terrible fates.
Probably Henry Cliffton and Thomas Carteret, high chest of drawers, ca. 1760.
Princeton University, Prospect House. Photo by Bruce M. White
The production origins of Morris Louis's color field paintings of the mid-20th century are also highlighted. Louis used thin washes of color in large abstract compositions like Intrigue, 1954, by diluting acrylic paints with gallons of turpentine. Praised for their flatness and airy immateriality, Louis's "veil paintings" are brought back to earth by an essay describing the notorious "turpentine camps" of the American South. A Depression-era photograph by Dorothea Lange accompanies the essay. The 1936 image shows a mother and her barefoot children and is titled Turpentine worker's family near Cordele, Alabama. Father's wages one dollar a day. This is the standard of living the turpentine trees support. Needless to say, these mostly African-American laborers have, until recently, never been seen or acknowledged as playing a role in the production of museum-quality art.
Morris Louis, Intrigue, 1954Princeton University Art Museum © 1954, Morris Louis
Nature's Nation argues that in the dawn of the Anthropocene period, in which humans play the predominant role in shaping the planet, we urgently need a new way of seeing the world around us—including within art and culture. "One of the great things about ecocriticism, which is the approach we take, is that it enables you to see as if through a new pair of glasses the environmental stories in any kind of work of art, not just in landscape paintings," said Kusserow. For many viewers, this mind-expanding art show at Princeton will be the first step toward that new understanding.
Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment is on view at the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, through January 6, 2019. Admission is free.
Reposted with permission from our media associate onEarth.
- These Sculptures Help Heal the Planet ›
- Sculptures Under the Sea—and on the Front Lines of Climate Change ›
- Culture Clash: Nature and Civilization Face Off in the Art of Michael ... ›
- Street Art and Augmented Reality Get Real About Climate in Miami ›
New fossils uncovered in Argentina may belong to one of the largest animals to have walked on Earth.
- Groundbreaking Fossil Shows Prehistoric 15-Foot Reptile Tried to ... ›
- Skull of Smallest Known Dinosaur Found in 99-Million-Year Old Amber ›
- Giant 'Toothed' Birds Flew Over Antarctica 40 Million Years Ago ... ›
- World's Second-Largest Egg Found in Antarctica Probably Hatched ... ›
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
A federal court on Tuesday struck down the Trump administration's rollback of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
- Pruitt Guts the Clean Power Plan: How Weak Will the New EPA ... ›
- It's Official: Trump Administration to Repeal Clean Power Plan ... ›
- 'Deadly' Clean Power Plan Replacement ›
Trending
By Jonathan Runstadler and Kaitlin Sawatzki
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have found coronavirus infections in pet cats and dogs and in multiple zoo animals, including big cats and gorillas. These infections have even happened when staff were using personal protective equipment.
Gorillas have been affected by human viruses in the past and are susceptible to the coronavirus. Thomas Fuhrmann via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
- Gorillas in San Diego Test Positive for Coronavirus - EcoWatch ›
- Wildlife Rehabilitators Are Overwhelmed During the Pandemic. In ... ›
- Coronavirus Pandemic Linked to Destruction of Wildlife and World's ... ›
- Utah Mink Becomes First Wild Animal to Test Positive for Coronavirus ›
By Peter Giger
The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
The period of the 45th presidency will go down as dark days for the United States — not just for the violent insurgency and impeachment that capped off Donald Trump's four years in office, but for every regressive action that came before.
- Biden Announces $2 Trillion Climate and Green Recovery Plan ... ›
- How Biden and Kerry Can Rebuild America's Climate Leadership ... ›
- Biden's EPA Pick Michael Regan Urged to Address Environmental ... ›
- How Joe Biden's Climate Plan Compares to the Green New Deal ... ›