The Culture of Nature

Catalog description

While many people may be familiar with the history of environmentalism in the global North, indigenous conceptions of the natural world, the Hudson River School, or the development of National Parks, what gets to stand as the official story of “nature”, how it is exploited or weaponized, has a distinctive importance today. How a culture engages the “natural world” is specific and contingent—it is their culture of nature, an entwinement of values, metaphors, and ideologies unique to them. Even commonplace terms like wilderness and nature have inverted their meanings over time, both within societies and between them. Climate change and new engagements with the “Anthropocene” have put many once-marginalized issues front and center: resource extraction, indigenous rights, racial justice, and ecological collapse. As such, this course considers art practices that investigate and mediate nature cultures, some even working within natural systems. The course will explore a range of related questions. For instance, how has the representation of “nature” evolved, and what role does that play in art making? How does an artistic lens construct a society’s understanding of the natural world? How might such practices influence policy making? With a focus on image making and material explorations, this course will equally be a workshop for both research and artmaking. Open to students working in any medium, we will be examining a broad history of nature cultures, as well as the students’ own.