ARTH 553
New Ecologies in Contemporary Art
Last Offered Fall 2022
Division I
This course is not offered in the current catalog

This seminar will consider a range of current artistic approaches to environmental questions, especially through the relational, systemic terms implied by ecology. As scholars have argued, where “nature” connotes that which is monolithic, ahistorical, and apart from humans, ecology reveals a situated and specific web of relationships, interdependencies, and power in which we are all implicated. Our seminar will pay particular attention to intersectional practices that acknowledge the ways extraction, exploitation, and dispossession have produced the environmental crises of the present, which also affect the most vulnerable and least responsible–both human and nonhuman–with greatest force. In addition to studying the work of emerging and established artists, we will read texts by the academics and activists with whom they are in dialogue, and welcome some of them as guests to our class. This seminar anticipates a group show on the subject at the Clark in summer 2023.