Art Resource Guide Part 2 PDF

describes people whose culture originates from a of Canada, who ethnically are neither Métis nor Inuit. particular place and is not specific to North America. “Aboriginal” refers to the first inhabitants of a territory, “Native American” describes cultures that originated and,...

describes people whose culture originates from a of Canada, who ethnically are neither Métis nor Inuit. particular place and is not specific to North America. “Aboriginal” refers to the first inhabitants of a territory, “Native American” describes cultures that originated and, in practice, is more common in Canada than the in North America—this term gained popularity United States. “Indian” is a term thought to derive through political movements in the 1960s and 1970s. from Christopher Columbus’s mistaken impression that It, however, remains politically charged because he had landed in South Asia, rather than the Americas. the term “America” itself originates from the Early Due to this history and its subsequent use, “Indian” Modern era of European colonial settlement and also remains a politically vexed term, but unlike many map-making. “First Nations” is a term commonly of the other names above, it carries legal standing in used in Canada, which recognizes the sovereignty of the United States, such as with the federal recognition Indigenous peoples. It describes Indigenous peoples of Indian Tribes. SELECTED WORK: Allora & Calzadilla, Land Mark (Foot Prints), 2002 Allora & Calzadilla is the name used by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla for their artistic partnership, which creates artwork through collaboration. Allora was born in Philadelphia in 1974 and was educated at the University of Richmond, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bowie High School - El Paso , TX and the Independent Study Program at New York’s Whitney American Art Museum. Calzadilla was born in 1971 in Havana, Cuba, and was educated at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Bard College. The artists met while studying abroad in Florence in 1995 and began a collaboration that utilizes various media encompassing sculpture, performance, photography, video, and sound art. Today, they live Jennifer Allora, left, and Guillermo Calzadilla at Lisson and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Gallery in New York City. Credit: Meron Tekie Menghistab for The New York Times Land Mark (Foot Prints) is part of an extended series of artworks that Allora & Calzadilla have created about land use on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. (A series is a group of artworks made around a particular theme or subject.) During the Second World War, the United States military took possession of Vieques as a location to store and test weapons. Residents of the island whose lives had been disrupted and environmentally harmed by the military occupation organized a civil disobedience campaign that began in the 1970s, led by members of the Vieques Fisherman’s Association.1 This tension was heightened further still in 1999, when on April 19 a fighter pilot and ground control officer accidentally killed a security guard after the pilot selected an incorrect target on the ground and dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs within feet of David Sanes Rodríguez, killing him instantly. Four others were injured as well.2 That same year, Allora & Calzadilla started to make artworks to raise awareness of the military occupation of Vieques, and they joined other activists in attempting to end it. For Land Mark (Foot Prints), Allora & Calzadilla joined civil disobedience groups in trespassing onto the bombing range on Vieques, an action that would trigger a heat sensor on the bombing range and effectively cease active explosions for the period that the protestors remained on site. For these visits, the artists created 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 49 custom-made shoes to be worn by themselves and other protestors, on the soles of which had been printed messages and pictures laser-cut onto a Plexiglas form. These included messages in both English and Spanish, such as “No more chemical and biological weapons on our land,” and “Grande es el imperio que desafiamos, pero mas grande es el derecho a la Libertad [Great is the empire we challenge, but greater is our right to liberty].”3 The works with images included a map of Vieques, with two large “X’s”: one over an ammunition storage area on the western side of the island and another over the bombing range on the eastern side. U.S. Navy vehicles on a beach at Camp Garcia, Vieques. Others depicted the weapons themselves, and others showed symbols of peace. One was a picture of the astronaut Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 space mission. Rather than celebrating the U.S. space program, like artist Alma Thomas—whose work will be discussed in the final section of this guide—had done decades earlier, Allora & Calzadilla’s invocation of Apollo 11 was intended to note what the artists perceived to be the expansive colonial activities of the United States. In the context of Land Bowie High School - El Paso , TX Mark, the picture records the reach of the U.S. government beyond the bounds of our planet, as witnessed by astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong having planted a U.S. flag on the moon. Allora & Calzadilla photographed the imprints that these custom-designed soles left upon the sand during their protest, and they display their artwork via two sets of twelve printed photographs. The two sets can be displayed separately. The photograph included in your Art Reproductions Booklet is drawn from the second of those collections. Whereas the “footprints” noted in the title of this work identify a specific imprint made within Allora & Calzadilla’s larger group of Land Mark activities, the phrase “Land Mark” itself is a poignant play on words. On the one hand, it describes the actual activity of marking land: something that the U.S. Navy had done through detonating weapons on Vieques, and the artists and other protesters had done more gently, through words and pictures that would blow away and disappear with the weather. Land Mark (Footprints) fashions forms and images that are purposefully fleeting and do not alter or impact their environment in the long run. (This approach is like that taken by Ana Mendieta in her Silueta series, which we will discuss in the final section of this guide.) As such, the title of Allora & Calzadilla’s artwork is also a play on words with the term “land mark.” When written as “landmark”—with no space between the words—this term refers to a prominently visible object within a landscape that allows travelers to establish their location. Human-made landmarks—such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Statue of Liberty in New York—tend to occupy their site with long- term constructions and are in physical standing. In contrast, Land Mark (Footprints) sought to remove a permanent occupant of Vieques with marks that were more short-lasting, low to the ground, and less destructive in nature. In response to continuing protests of its occupation of Vieques, the U.S. military began to close the site in 2001 and left entirely in 2003. The end of weapons testing and the departure of the military, however, did not immediately repair the long-term damage that had been done to the island. Likewise, Allora & Caldzadilla did not cease their engagement with Vieques after the creation of Land Mark (Foot Prints) and the departure of the U.S. Navy. Their 2005 work Under Discussion, for instance, is a six-minute video that shows a fisherman driving an upside-down table with a motor attached to the back around the island. Allora 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 50 & Caldzadilla were interested in the metaphor of a table as an object that brings together people for a discussion, but when upturned, such an object also communicates disfunction. The man in the video circles a traditional path for fishing in Vieques, which then included large craters from exploded bombs and signs indicating the presence of other explosives that had never detonated. The path of the fisherman, like that of footprints, is yet another way of marking the land in a manner that leaves no permanent trace.4 Describing their larger project Land Mark, Allora & Calzadilla pose a series of questions to provoke U.S. Navy officials dismantling makeshift buildings thought, rather than provide answers. These erected by protesters. questions include: 6 How is land differentiated from other land by the way it is marked? 6 Who decides what is worth preserving and what should be destroyed? 6 What are the strategies for reclaiming marked land? Bowie High School - El Paso , TX 6 How does one articulate an ethics and politics of land use?5 SELECTED WORK: Kent Monkman, The Fourth World, 2012 Kent Monkman was born in 1965 in St. Mary’s, Ontario, Canada. He identifies as a Cree artist and is a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation. Working across painting, film, video, performance, and installation, he is one of the most prominent and widely recognized Indigenous North American artists working today. His artworks address histories of colonization and Indigenous culture. Monkman’s Fourth World, like many of his paintings, both appropriates the artwork of other artists and blurs the time periods of cultural encounters. “Appropriation” is an artistic technique in which one artist strategically uses the Kent Monkman is a Cree artist who is one of the most form of another artwork to give it new meaning. prominent and widely recognized Indigenous North American The term began to be commonly used in the 1980s, artists working today. at which time artists such as Sherrie Levine showed Photo by Ryan Van Der Hout photographs that had been taken of other photographs, rather than live subjects. Although a Levine image might look identical to that of an earlier, modern photographer like Walker Evans, their two photographs communicate differently because of the time in which they were made, the identity of the artist, and their intention in making the work. In the case of Monkman’s Fourth World, two well-known artistic traditions 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 51 are cited: nineteenth-century American Romantic landscape painting and twentieth-century site- specific sculpture. Monkman depicts three blonde-haired male figures—two on horseback and one waving his camouflage shirt wildly above his head—corralling a small herd of bison, or, as they are commonly called, buffalo, through two curved walls set beneath the Yosemite Falls. The depiction of the famed waterfall in what is now Yosemite National Park is based on a painting titled Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall from 1864 by the German-born, American painter Albert Bierstadt.6 Alongside contemporaries such as Thomas Moran and Thomas Hill, Bierstadt was part of an influential group of American artists who traveled throughout the western United States in the late nineteenth century, painting dramatic vistas of mountains and waterfalls to be displayed back in the East. These large-scale paintings showed the American Bowie High School - El Paso , TX West to be a landscape of fantastic drama and beauty, drawing upon the conventions of European Romanticism to stir interest among the American public in expanding the land claimed by the United Albert Bierstadt’s 1864 painting Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall States all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Associated serves as source material for Monkman’s The Fourth World. with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, these paintings also played a direct role in convincing members of Congress to dedicate national park lands to protect the kind of environments shown by Bierstadt. The Romantic tradition of American landscape paintings of the West had the effect of protecting places like Yosemite National Park from large-scale settlement. However, the occupation and governance of those same lands by the United States government also brutally displaced their Indigenous inhabitants, many of whom were either killed directly or worked to death as part of the massacre of Indigenous populations across the nineteenth century now often referred to as the California genocide. None of the Miwok peoples who lived on that land in 1864 are shown in Monkman’s painting or in Bierstadt’s original, which only shows two groups, one group of white pioneers gathered around a campfire and a second group seen by the water on horseback. Fourth World instead depicts contemporary men “playing Indian,” which is to say, performing their own appropriation of Indigenous cultural practice for personal enjoyment. They each wear green camouflage, which from head-to-toe remains a means for hunters to disguise themselves in the wild. Although when worn topless, the camouflage becomes more of a fashion statement, aligning its wearer with the mass popularization of military style. The fact that these cultural appropriations are all shown in the same space emphasizes that the history Monkman paints is decidedly complicated. For example, the horses that these men ride—and which became deeply associated with Native Americans during this period of the “Wild West”—were themselves an animal that had been introduced to North America by European colonists beginning in the sixteenth century. The second artistic appropriation in Monkman’s painting is the copper-colored walls through which the bison 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 52 run. They are a copy of the artwork Clara-Clara (1983) by the American artist Richard Serra. The color itself is not copper, but the weathered color of rusted COR-TEN steel, a material preferred by Serra for his large-scale, site-specific sculpture. First associated with the Postminimalism movement of the late 1960s, Serra worked alongside the Land art movement to establish site-specificity as a key element of his outdoor sculpture. In fact, Serra has been uniquely influential in solidifying the idea of site-specificity for art Buffalo being chased off a cliff, painted by Alfred Jacob Miller historians as a result of a contentious public in the late nineteenth century. Traditionally Native American hearing surrounding his work Tilted Arc in the hunters would use natural land formations, like two narrow cliffs, to direct bison for slaughter. 1980s. Originally installed in lower Manhattan in 1981 using public funds, Tilted Arc was cast in controversy following complaints from a small number of federal white-collar workers employed in the area. As a result, a hearing was organized to discuss relocating the sculpture. Despite Serra’s adamant testimony that moving the sculptural element of Tilted Arc was tantamount to negating its site-specificity and therefore the work as a whole, the sculptural element was removed from its site in 1989, prompting Serra to declare that his work had been destroyed.7 Clara-Clara was also similarly moved; it had been created for the Bowie High School - El Paso , TX Beaubourg area of Paris but was moved to Paris’s Tuileries Garden for the exhibition Monumenta 2008.8 Rather than including Clara-Clara as only an abstract sculpture, Monkman deploys it in The Fourth World as a buffalo jump. Traditionally Native American hunters would use natural land formations, like two narrow cliffs, to direct bison for slaughter. The presence of Clara-Clara in Monkman’s painting similarly invokes an impending slaughter, alluding to the mass killing of bison that took place across the nineteenth century to the point that the animals were on the brink of extinction.9 At once utterly frank about the seizure of lands in the American West and the mass killing of Indigenous people and animals alike across the nineteenth century, Monkman’s painting is also purposefully impossible. It is an image that plays upon the different ways in which it seems realistic because of the many incorrect assumptions that the general public still holds about the differences and unique cultural practices of specific Indigenous communities. As Monkman has commented: The more I looked at art of the nineteenth century going backwards in time, the more I realized that those paintings of that time were a manifesto, this visual manifesto of colonization and this was the visual record, this was the European’s imagination of what he saw North America being and how he saw himself taking ownership of it and how he saw the Aboriginal people relating to himself but also to landscape.10 Similar to Will Wilson’s critique of Edward Curtis’s stereotyped photographs of Native Americans, which we will discuss shortly, the work by Monkman invokes George Catlin’s earlier paintings of the nineteenth century documenting and effectively type-casting native subjects. This diminishing of culture and its ability to thrive connects with the phrase “Fourth World” that Monkman includes in the title of his painting. Following the more common nomenclature of First World, Second World, and Third World, the Fourth World refers to cultures that are without their own sovereignty because they are forced to exist within another political nation. It is a problem at the heart of the impossibilities depicted in The Fourth World. 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 53 SELECTED WORK: Bonnie Devine, Battle for the Woodlands, 2014–15 Bonnie Devine was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1952. She is an Indigenous installation artist, curator, writer, and educator, and member of the Serpent River First Nation of Northern Ontario (Anishinaabe/Ojibwa).11 She studied art at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD) and earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from York University in 1999. Since 2008, she has taught at OCAD and served as Founding Chair of its Indigenous Visual Culture Program. Devine’s early site-specific installations include Reclamation Project, which consisted quite simply of a strip of sod that she draped across different Bonnie Devine is an Indigenous installation artist, curator, landscapes in southern Ontario. As Devine explains, writer, educator, and member of the Serpent River First Nation of Northern Ontario (Anishinaabe/Ojibwa). I made Reclamation Project in response to Image courtesy AGO the Ipperwash Crisis, an Ontario Provincial Bowie High School - El Paso , TX Police action against an Indigenous protest at Camp Ipperwash in the Kettle and Stony Point First Nation in September 1995, during which an Anishnaabe protester Dudley George was shot and killed by the police. In an effort to comment on the land claim and standoff at Camp Ipperwash, I installed six rolls of sod at various sites... for 10 minutes or so, just long enough for me to take a polaroid picture.12 The first site was a gravel road that adjoins two fields in the Lynde Shores Conservation Area. In another site, the sod adorned the front steps of a sizeable health institute in downtown Toronto. In each case, the fleetingness of the sod’s placement served to highlight the difference in timescales of colonial land claims in present-day Ontario and Devine’s own re-clamation of such lands. As with the ephemeral site performances by Rebecca Belmore and Ana Mendieta that we will discuss later in the guide, Devine’s work didn’t seek the status of being permanent to its site or of possessing it. Devine’s work resists the notion that sites should or even can be possessed. Another of Devine’s earlier works includes techniques of sewing to examine and sustain those traditional art-making techniques of Anishinaabe/Ojibwa culture. In Canoe of 2003, Devine stitched together hundreds of pages of paper from her MFA thesis to form a sixteen-foot canoe, which she displayed suspended from the ceiling. She displayed Canoe as part of a larger, multi-media installation titled Stories from the Shield, which also included drawings, rocks and tree stumps that Devine wrapped in silk threads, and video depicting her family members discussing the negative effects that uranium mining has had on the Serpent River First Nation. This connection between the cultural practices of the Serpent River First Nation and the environmental and political difficulties it has suffered through the occupation of its lands is further discussed in the pages of Devine’s thesis. As the art historian Cynthia Fowler describes, [the] pages from Devine’s thesis include descriptions of traditional canoe technology, which the artist followed in spirit when making her own canoe; the 1850 Robinson Huron Treaty, originated by the Canadian government to control the northern shores of Lake Huron in large part for the purpose of developing the mining industry; and documentation of Devine’s research on the 1950s uranium-mining debacle described by her family members in the video.13 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 54 In all, Devine’s interests in bringing together Indigenous art-making practices, collective memory, and environmental impact through multi- media installations can be followed through to her more recent exhibition Battle for the Woodlands. Devine created Battle for the Woodlands over the period from 2014–15 for display in its own room in the Art Gallery of Ontario. Including freestanding sculptures made from maple and willow trees and decorated moose and buffalo hides, the work is anchored by a nineteenth-century colonial map of the border region between Upper Canada, Lower Canada, and the United States. Over this map, which is cropped to include only two of the Great Lakes, Devine depicts the entire aquatic system of the five Great Lakes as five animals painted in red oxide—buffalo, otter, turtle, rabbit, and leviathan— in addition to showing clashes between British, American, and Indigenous peoples, and placing beads along borderlines once established by treaties Bowie High School - El Paso , TX that were later broken. As Devine has explained, “I felt that no map of the Eastern Woodlands of North America should exclude its numinous and monumental heart, the An Anishinaabe cape. Anishinaabe women were known for life-giving waters of our home.... I pictured them their skillfull beadwork and textile ornamentation. as spirit beings, for that is what they are.”14 A final element of the painting shows dozens of animals, including deer, bison, bear, and rabbits fleeing to the West. In her discussion of the artwork, Devine describes this migration as the “catastrophic habitat loss” also caused by colonial settlement.15 Through all the elements of her installation, Devine shows the implications of forced occupation, not only on political borders, but also on the ecological life in the places where those military battles are staged and the communities settled in their aftermath. Writing about her earlier installation Stories from the Shield, Devine described her artistic project as follows: “In all of these works, my primary desire has been to examine and perhaps articulate the delicate yet elemental relationship of land to consciousness, especially as this is revealed in the technologies, designs, and narrative traditions of the Ojibway.”16 This is a sentiment that aptly describes Battle for the Woodlands. One of the central elements to that “consciousness” about land is representation. The map with which Devine’s painting began is one means of representing land that uses proper names not only to identify landmarks like rivers and lakes, but also to designate ownership, by nations such as the United States and Canada. By layering an opposing visual map overtop of the colonial one, Devine invokes a different approach to imaging the territory that, as art historian Mark Cheetham has written, acknowledges “the Indigenous peoples who continue to experience displacement.”17 The colonial map draws divisions within territory, whereas Devine’s representation of animals, water, land, and people in co-existence creates connection rather than separation. 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 55 SELECTED WORK: Will Wilson, Church Rock Spill Evaporation Ponds, Church Rock, New Mexico, Dinétah, 2019 Will Wilson is a contemporary Diné (Navajo) artist. After spending the formative years of his life on Dinétah (the traditional homeland of the Navajo people, which is called the Navajo Nation under U.S. law), Wilson studied photography, sculpture, and art history at Oberlin College, earning a bachelor’s degree in studio art and art history in 1993, and at the University of New Mexico, where he was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2002. Formerly the Head of Photography at Santa Fe Community College, he is presently a professor of art at the University of Texas at Austin. Church Rock Spill Evaporation Ponds is part of a photographic series Wilson calls “Survey.” In this project, he documents contaminated lands within and on the border of Dinétah that remain polluted Bowie High School - El Paso , TX as a result of various environmentally harmful extraction activities carried out by the United States government and private American companies. From the 1940s until the 1980s, during a period in which the U.S. stockpiled nuclear weapons, approximately four million tons of uranium ore were extracted from mines on the lands of the Navajo Nation.18 Church Rock Spill is an aerial view, meaning that it is a photographic image shot from above, in the sky. Its subject is two ponds used to evaporate Will Wilson is a contemporary Diné (Navajo) artist. water contaminated with tailings, which is a radioactive waste product from uranium mining that contains heavy metals and radium. It is pumped from the mine into a pond for storage. When that pond is full, it is allowed to evaporate in the sun until dry, at which time its toxic liner is removed and replaced. On July 16, 1979, the dam holding contaminated water at the Church Rock uranium mill breached, releasing more than 93 million gallons of radioactive liquid into the Puerco River, traveling eighty miles downstream to Navajo County, Arizona, and on to the Navajo Nation. It remains the largest radioactive spill in U.S. history. In her book about of the disaster, Judy Pasternak described its immediate effects: The water, filled with acids from the milling process, twisted a metal culvert in the Puerco and burned the feet of a little boy who went wading. Sheep keeled over and died, and crops curdled along the banks. The surge of radiation was detected as far away as Sanders, Arizona, fifty miles downstream.19 Years later, representatives of the Navajo Nation spoke at a congressional hearing to detail the remaining hazards still lingering on site. These have since been acknowledged by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which recognized in a 2014 report that “Navajo people continue to live with the environmental and health effects from mining operations: more than 500 abandoned mines are located across the reservation, 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 56 some close to homes and communities, and an unknown number of homes and drinking water sources contain radioactive elements.”20 Although the Church Rock spill occurred less than four months after Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania—and was larger—it was vastly underreported in comparison to the earlier disaster. As such, Wilson’s photograph of the tailing ponds in 2019 continues to bring this event into public view and remind the public that the toxicity of the spill remains on the land. Sites like Church Rock in the sparsely populated desert regions of the American West have been selected for toxic A sign placed by the New Mexico Environmental Improvement activities like uranium mining and nuclear weapons Division discouraging use of the Puerco River. testing throughout the twentieth and twenty- first centuries because of the perception that they were nonliving spaces that were not populated. Desert ecosystems, however, are very much alive, and the impact of mining can be felt by populations of people who live many miles away from the actual site of extraction. In selecting sites local to Dinétah for “Survey,” Wilson’s photographic series emphasizes this very point Bowie High School - El Paso , TX that the polluted lands depicted in his photographs were not unpopulated. Further, the activities of the military and mining industries have perpetuated a false assumption that the Indigenous peoples of North America exist only in the past, having disappeared when the West was settled under Manifest Destiny. More pointedly, Wilson has identified the perpetuation of this false narrative through the practice of an earlier, twentieth-century photographer named Edward S. Curtis, who widely exhibited stereotyped portraits of Native American subjects. In Wilson’s words, As an indigenous artist working in the 21st century, employing media that range from historical photographic processes to the randomization and projection of complex visual systems within virtual environments, I am impatient with the way that American culture remains enamored of one particular moment in a photographic exchange between Euro-American and Aboriginal American societies: the decades from 1907 to 1930 when photographer Edward S. Curtis produced The North American Indian. For many people even today, Native people remain frozen in time in Curtis photos.... I propose to create a body of photographic inquiry that will stimulate a critical dialogue and reflection around the historic and contemporary “photographic exchange” as it pertains to Native Americans. My aim is to convene indigenous artists, art professionals and government leaders, as well as the general public, to engage in the performative ritual that is the studio portrait.21 One of Wilson’s artistic responses to Curtis’s project for the broad perception of Native American identity was to create his own portraits in a studio setting using the traditional technique of large format wet plate collodion photographs. The wet plate collodion technique creates a glass-plate negative measuring eight inches by ten inches in the camera. Prints made from the glass-plate negative are very high in detail and quality, in comparison to photographs printed from the smaller, modern technology of 35-millimeter negatives. On his personal, artist’s website, Wilson displays dozens of reproductions of these portrait photographs, emphasizing the uniqueness of each subject, sometimes shown alone, sometimes with a partner, or other family members, resisting the notion that all Indigenous subjects belong to a pre-cast and predictable type. Wilson’s portraits seek to humanize pictures of people who historically have been dehumanized. In this way, Wilson’s approach is akin to the photographic projects of LaToya Ruby Frazier who we will discuss in 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 57  the final section of the resource guide. As a final note, we also might consider Wilson’s title “Survey” for his series. Based on the definition of this term in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, Wilson’s project would seem to appropriately fit multiple definitions of a survey: a verb, “to examine as to condition, situation, or value”; “to determine and delineate the form, extent, and position of (such as a tract of land)”: and “to view or consider comprehensively.”22 While appropriate descriptions of his work, these contemporary definitions do not capture the historical resonance of the surveys carried out in the work of nineteenth-century American photographers, including Timothy O’Sullivan and Arthur Schott, each of whom developed specific photographic techniques to render the lands and native peoples of the American West as information, which could then be processed and used by the United States government.23 As with his portraits, Wilson’s photographs of contaminated lands in Dinétah situate present-day conditions in the memories and ongoing repercussions of the past. SECTION II SUMMARY terminology of a prominent “landmark,” in Prior to the modern and contemporary period, that imprints in the sand were fleeting, but the 6 land had been used in art primarily as a subject photographs are more lasting. to represent in landscape paintings, which 6 Allora & Calzadilla’s work on Vieques often were used for political purposes. ultimately invites consideration of ethics in Contemporary artists have adapted the land use and reclamation. 6 Bowie High School - El Paso , TX tradition of landscape painting to engage Selected Work: Kent Monkman, The current issues of politics, climate, and Fourth World, 2012 environmentalism. 6 Kent Monkman is a Cree artist whose 6 There are many terms in circulation that paintings, films, videos, performances, and describe the people who lived in present-day installations address histories of colonization North America prior to European colonization, and Indigenous culture. each with its own particular history and 6 Monkman’s Fourth World both appropriates connotations. the artwork of other artists and blurs the time Selected Work: Allora & Calzadilla, Land periods of cultural encounters. Mark (Foot Prints), 2002 6 The waterfall depicted in Monkman’s painting 6 Allora & Calzadilla began collaborating is based on a nineteenth-century painting as artists after meeting one another while by Albert Bierstadt, whose pictures of the studying abroad in Florence. American West were used to strengthen the Land Mark (Foot Prints) is part of an extended cultural belief in Manifest Destiny. 6 series of artworks that Allora & Calzadilla 6 The depiction of blonde-haired men culturally have created about land use on the island of appropriating Indigenous hunting practices Vieques, Puerto Rico. is tied to the complex history of stereotypical Land Mark (Foot Prints) was part of a representations as well as the exclusion of 6 civil disobedience protest, which involved native peoples, including the Miwok tribe, occupying a bombing range on Vieques and who were not depicted in Bierstadt’s original leaving messages in the sand from custom- painting of the Yosemite waterfall. made shoes. 6 The second artistic appropriation in Monkman’s The photographs of Land Mark (Foot Prints) painting is the copper-colored walls through 6 translate Allora & Calzadilla’s action into which the bison run, which is a copy of the a visual artwork that can be displayed artwork Clara-Clara by Richard Serra. in museums. The works play with the 6 The Fourth World, like much of Monkman’s 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 58  artwork, invites its spectator to critically Selected Work: Will Wilson, Church evaluate the role of European and American Rock Spill Evaporation Ponds, Church representations of native subjects and lifeways. Rock, New Mexico, Dinétah, 2019 Selected Work: Bonnie Devine, Battle for 6 Will Wilson is a contemporary Diné (Navajo) the Woodlands, 2014 artist, who spent the formative years of his life 6 Bonnie Devine is a contemporary installation on Dinétah (Navajo Nation). artist, curator, writer, and educator, and 6 Church Rock Spill Evaporation Ponds is part member of the Serpent River First Nation of of a photographic series Wilson calls “Survey” Northern Ontario (Anishinaabe/Ojibwa). that documents contaminated lands within 6 Early projects by Devine, such as Reclamation Dinétah and its borders. Project, draw attention to and resist colonial 6 Church Rock Spill is an aerial view of two land occupation in North America. ponds used to evaporate water contaminated 6 Other earlier works, such as Stories from the with tailings from uranium mining at the site Shield, incorporate traditional practices, such of the largest radioactive spill in U.S. History. as weaving and canoe-building, to address 6 The selected sites for for Wilson’s photographic the environmental and political difficulties series titled “Survey” address the history experienced by the Serpent River First Nation. of environmental pollution on lands in 6 Battle for the Woodlands is a multimedia the American West that were home to installation that addresses land use and native peoples but were treated by the U.S. Bowie High School - El Paso , TX environmental harm in the Eastern Woodlands government as empty lands for mineral of North America in the nineteenth century. extraction and toxic storage. 6 Devine creates conflicting approaches to 6 Wilson’s art is dedicated to humanizing representing animals, water, land, and people groups of people who have historically been in Battle for the Woodlands. The approach stereotyped, while also bringing awareness inspired by a colonial map shows divisions, to environmental problems that have been in contrast to Devine’s own painting and historically suppressed. sculpture, which is based on co-existence and connection. 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 59  Section III Pollution and Extraction The segment of environmentalist art within the larger history of environmental art has a strong tradition of documentation that depicts, in some instances, landscapes being polluted or, in other instances, the effects of that pollution on specific communities. In the twentieth century, an example of the former includes the Documerica project created by the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s that produced more than 20,000 photographs of American pollution, infrastructure, and wilderness. An example of the latter includes W. Eugene Smith’s three-year Bowie High School - El Paso , TX project in Minamata, Japan, to photograph the effects of mercury poisoning from a local factory. Across both examples, a tradition of art was established using Eugene Smith spent three years in Minamata, Japan, photographing the effects of mercury poisoning from a local photography as a tool to record and communicate factory. environmental damage. Credit/copyright: Ishikawa Takeshi In contemporary art being produced today, a number of artists continue to engage issues of ecology and the magnificence of something that can be felt but not climate through the dramatization of pollution. fully understood. When realized in photography, a toxic Photographer Chris Jordan takes close-up photographs sublime has an effect of making the extreme appearance of the plastic waste found in dead, decaying birds of pollution beautiful and almost pleasurable to look at. in the series “Midway.” Yao Lu’s series “New Each of the artworks discussed in this section takes Landscapes” depicts mounds of garbage laden with a different approach to addressing issues of pollution green netting photographed in a manner that initially and, in some cases, the extraction of oil, gas, and/ appears like the landscapes of traditional Chinese or minerals from the earth. In line with recent scroll paintings, until small details reveal their real environmental historians and cultural critics who focus content. on the structural and severe effects of the entanglement Perhaps best known among this group of photographers of petroleum with all facets of modern life, the artists is Edward Burtynsky, who creates colorful images of in this section approach pollution through projects polluted rivers and the waste produced from industrial that invite understanding beyond a single feeling mining that have been coined by scholars as a “toxic like beauty or awe. They are, instead, multi-layered sublime.”24 The term “sublime” is a concept that has projects in which multiple activities and perspectives a long history dating back to ancient philosophy, and, converge. in general, refers to an overwhelming sense of awe at 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 60 SELECTED WORK: Agnes Denes, Wheatfield—A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan—With Agnes Denes Standing in the Field, 1982 Agnes Denes (b. 1931) is a Hungarian-born American artist whose practice is based in New York City. She studied at the New School and Columbia University, beginning her career as a poet before pursuing visual art full-time. Denes— alongside the Harrisons, who will be discussed in the next section—was one of the first artists in the postwar decades to articulate an explicitly ecological direction for art. Denes’s work Rice/Tree/Burial of 1968 is one of the foundational works of contemporary ecological art. Described by Denes as a “manifesto”—meaning: a creative work that sets out an agenda for radical change—the work consisted of three components Bowie High School - El Paso , TX and was carried out in Sullivan County, New York. Agnes Denes added a fourth element to her three-part artwork The rice in the title was actual rice that Denes Rice/Tree/Burial that involved the precarious act of filming planted in the ground, as both a gesture and actual the precipice of Niagara Falls for a sustained period of seven means to sustain life. The tree mentioned was days, while propped out over the falls on a constructed ledge. a group of mature trees that the artist wrapped in chains, creating a zig-zagging pattern of metal reaching up toward the sky, as a symbolic expression of human damage and interference with the natural world. The burial Denes staged was one of burying a haiku poem she had written. The artist has stated that she did not keep a record of her poem since part of her expression was to give up human thought and the conventions of poetic form into the earth. All of these actions constitute the first of many works that Denes describes as exercises in “Eco-Logic, a complex of site-oriented artworks that br[ing] together philosophical concepts and ecological concerns.”25 Nearly a decade later, Denes was asked to re-create this work at Artpark, an outdoor space for site-based artworks in Lewiston, New York, which she did with slight modifications. In the second iteration, the rice was planted on a half-acre of land, but its growth was affected by mutations from contaminants in the soil. The contaminants arose from Artpark’s proximity to Love Canal, an abandoned waterway off of the Niagara River in Niagara Falls. Love Canal was the site where some 21,000 tons of toxins were dumped by the Hooker Chemical Company (now, Occidental Petroleum Company) in the mid-twentieth century. While Denes, once again, chained trees in the second iteration of Rice/Tree/Burial, she did not bury a poem, but instead fashioned a time capsule that she encased in nine feet of concrete, with a plaque indicating that it should not be opened until the year 2979. The artist also added a fourth element to the previously three-part artwork that involved the precarious act of filming the precipice of Niagara Falls for a sustained period of seven days, while propped out over the falls on a constructed ledge. Denes’s next major project following the conclusion of her performance and installation at Artpark was Wheatfield–A Confrontation. Similar to her preceding artwork, Wheatfield involved multiple steps, but is most widely remembered for its work of largest scale, in which Denes planted and grew two acres of wheat in Lower 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 61 Manhattan. At the time, prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the land was located directly beneath the World Trade Center towers, near Wall Street and in view of the Statue of Liberty. The complexity of the work grows out of its “confrontations,” as Denes’s title suggests, and its contradictions. Some of these arise from the site itself: rather than using rich agricultural soil that would typically support a field of wheat, Denes planted hers on polluted land, full of debris—land that had been previously used as the Battery Park Landfill. After she harvested her crop in August 1982, the land was plowed to build high- end real estate. Today, no trace of Denes’s work is A view of the Battery Park landfill in 1973, with the World present on the site. Trade Center towers in the background. The landfill area was In a statement dating from 1982, Denes describes the where Denes planted a wheatfield. continuation of the artwork beyond the field itself: Planting and harvesting a field of wheat on land worth $4.5 billion created a powerful paradox. Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns. It Bowie High School - El Paso , TX called attention to our misplaced priorities. The harvested grain traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger” organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art (1987–90). The seeds were carried away by people who planted them in many parts of the globe.26 Thus, Wheatfield existed not only as an actual field of wheat, but also as an idea—returning cultivated land to the island of Manhattan—and was dispersed throughout the world in the exhibition that traveled outward from Minnesota and in the seeds that visitors to that exhibition took to their own communities. In addition to the exhibition and the seeds, there are also photographs. Today, students of art history know Wheatfield only through descriptions of the work and documentary images taken of it by Denes. Nine of these photographs are commonly circulated and include: shots of the barren landfill prior to planting, images of golden wheat underneath the World Trade Center, views of the wheat being harvested, and an aerial shot of the rectangular patch of earth on which it was planted. While indeed informative and documentary, these photographs also present a kind of jarring confrontation in that they juxtapose different layers of expectation with one another. In the image featured in your Art Reproductions Booklet, we see Denes herself walking through the wheat with a stick. It is the kind of image one would expect in a highly rural environment, and yet, in the background rise multiple skyscrapers. These are similarly playful photographs that make clear that Wheatfield was never intended to be a singular idea. Its very existence represents an unlikely collision of two different ways of imagining human life on the planet: the one in dense, urban construction and the other in open, pastoral farmland. Both ideas are central to imagining the history of land use and pollution in the United States, but they are rarely brought into the same space with one another. In all, many of Denes’s photographs of Wheatfield look like manipulated images, where one photograph has been collaged with another, either through printing multiple negatives or cutting printed photographs. One of its many confrontational qualities, however, is that Wheatfield and its images actually existed. Their seeming impossibility is its own powerful seed. Following Wheatfield, Denes went on to create many impactful ecological artworks around the world, and none has been more ambitious than Tree Mountain. Originally conceived in 1982—during the same year Denes made 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 62 Wheatfield—in Tree Mountain Denes returned to her interest in time capsules. But instead of burying a conventional time capsule, she began to think of trees (like the seeds of Wheatfield) as their own kind of “living time capsule.” For Tree Mountain, Denes proposed a pattern of 10,000 trees, to be planted by 10,000 people, according to an intricate geometrical spiral. Given these significant provisions, it took a decade for Denes to find the funds and land to realize her vision, which came to fruition when the government of Finland announced at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that it would sponsor her piece. Now in its third decade, Tree Mountain was in fact planted with some 11,000 trees by 11,000 participants, exceeding Denes’s original expectation. A view of Tree Mountain in the winter. With the interesting proviso that each of the By Strata Suomi - https://www.flickr.com/photos/99500903@ people who planted these trees would hold right of N08/9373702344, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=77173861 ownership to their tree for a period of four hundred years, Denes’s artwork continues to challenge the norms of how communities interact with local ecosystems and brings forth the possibility that works of art Bowie High School - El Paso , TX might span large swaths of time and space in their impact and reach. SELECTED WORK: Noah Purifoy, Offshore Drilling, 1995 Noah Purifoy was born in Snow Hill, Alabama, in 1917, and died in 2004, having lived and worked in Los Angeles, California, and the nearby town of Joshua Tree, California. The twelfth of thirteen children, he grew up in poverty in a sharecropping family and went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from Alabama State Teachers College and a master’s in social work from Atlanta University in the 1940s, before moving West and studying for a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Chouinard Art Institute in 1956. As galleries in Los Angeles were not open to showing Black artists, Purifoy, like a number of other emerging, West Coast African-American artists of the period, began his arts career with design objects, such as stereo cabinets, beds, and wall decorations. In 1964, he co-founded the Watts Towers Arts Center, which was named after the independent artwork created in the LA neighborhood of Watts by Simon Rodia over decades in the twentieth century. The Watts Towers Arts Center provides arts instruction and opportunity for members of the Watts community. Two years later, Purifoy’s practice gained a substantial new audience when he created and exhibited a series of “junk art” sculptures in a traveling exhibition titled 66 Signs of Neon. The exhibition arose as a direct response to the August 1965 Watts Rebellion: a period of six days in which people in Watts—a predominately Black neighborhood located directly south of downtown Los Angeles—took to the streets following the arrest of an African-American man suspected of driving under the influence. Longstanding frustration with socioeconomic conditions and police brutality exploded, and the Rebellion resulted in thirty-four deaths, more than one thousand injuries, damage to a thousand buildings, and four thousand arrests. Combing through debris left in the aftermath of the rebellion, Purifoy worked alongside the artist Judson Powell to organize an exhibition of assembled sculpture created from the found refuse. Purifoy and Powell 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 63 began with materials created from the lead of melted neon signs and added works by six additional artists to build a total exhibition of sixty-six objects. The exhibition traveled nationally and internationally, with some of its objects being sold and replaced. The result was an exhibition that drew upon recent artistic developments in producing sculpture using found materials, while at the same time communicating a social message about racial discrimination and police violence in communities of color. In 1966, Purifoy left his position at the Watts Towers Arts Center to teach at California colleges and universities, including UCLA; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. Then, in the late 1970s, he transitioned from working as an artist to arts administration as a member of the California Arts Council. His accomplishments during his decade of service on the Council include programs such Bowie High School - El Paso , TX as Artists in Social Institutions, which brought art into California’s state prison system. In 1989, he transitioned once again, moving to the town of Noah Purifoy in front of a photographic installation of the Joshua Tree in California’s Mojave Desert to begin Watts Rebellion, by Harry Drinkwater, at the 66 Signs of Neon creating outdoor works of art, which he did for the exhibition at USC, c. 1966. next fifteen years, until his death. Photograph courtesy of Harry Drinkwater While Purifoy’s earlier junk sculpture for 66 Signs of Neon certainly embodies environmental issues, including the toxicity of building materials, his practice took a more decisive environmental turn with the installation of his new sculptures around his home, creating what is now called the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum. The museum consists of dozens of site-based sculptures arranged in a loose configuration. Some, like Carousel, are small structures that one can enter and walk around in. Others, like Bowling Balls I, are more conventionally freestanding sculpture. All the works employ found objects, such as bowling balls, cafeteria trays, wire, old tires, televisions and other household appliances, and scrap metal. Speaking in an oral interview, Purifoy connected the availability of such “junk,” as he called it, to the environmental experience of communities of color. Responding to why such junk appealed to him, he commented: First, it’s accessible.... In large cities, junk is not often disposed of in junk piles, so to speak, at garbage dumps. It’s exposed out oftentimes in communities that don’t care.... In Watts it was extremely accessible. Number two, it relates to poor people. Wherever there are poor people, there’s piles of junk. People bring the junk there.27 When Purifoy decided to move to the Mojave Desert, he did so to consciously commit to living a life of poverty while producing his final body of artwork. While some of the materials he incorporated into his Outdoor Museum were found in Joshua Tree, others were brought to him from Los Angeles by friends. Offshore Drilling, Purifoy’s work that is featured in your Art Reproductions Booklet, is one of the artworks 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 64 at the Outdoor Museum. It is composed of a complex tangle of rusted scrap metal that has been bolted and fastened together. This work not only invokes the kind of offshore oil drilling platforms named in its title, but it also draws upon the aesthetic language of modern sculpture, from Russian revolutionaries like Vladimir Tatlin to postwar modernists like Anthony Caro. While decidedly heavy, the work appears to hover in the air atop four metal legs, with horizontal appendages that veer off to either side. As an abstract artwork, it does not look like an actual oil drilling rig, even though its suspension in air and industrial materials draw upon the same visual language as that of rigs suspended on the surface of the ocean. Many of those rigs populate the waters off the coast of Southern California, and one, in particular, was the source of intense national coverage following the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara. Drawing upon the manner in which the Santa Bowie High School - El Paso , TX Barbara spill and environmentalist activities of the 1960s and 1970s impacted less affluent communities, Purifoy’s Offshore Drilling poses critical questions to its viewer about poverty, oil extraction, and toxicity. For while communities like Joshua Tree or Watts are not immediately affected by oil spills, like wealthy Southern California communities such as Santa Barbara, Noah Purifoy in his workshop, Joshua Tree, early 1990s. they are nonetheless affected indirectly and Photo Source: Noah Purifoy Foundation more systemically over time. This is because the distribution of wealth, increases in industrial production, and expansion of urban infrastructure that result from oil extraction disproportionately benefit wealthy communities, while that industrial production and infrastructure tend to further pollute and disrupt poorer communities and their residents. In many ways, Purifoy’s Outdoor Museum can be understood as its own miniaturization of a city—it has many structures, representations of different amenities, and even signs—but it is a city that lays bare the inequalities that many actual cities hide by assigning the effects of poverty and pollution to areas and communities that are less visible from the outside. As a case in point, at the Outdoor Museum Offshore Drilling is located right beside an all-white sculpture named Ode to Frank Gehry (2000), which is also suspended on poles, making the two works like pendants to one another. Whereas Offshore Drilling points to the ways in which environmental racism tends to disappear beneath the surface image of cities, Ode to Frank Gehry is named after the prominent LA architect whose buildings define the image of cities not only in Southern California, but all over the world. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, of 1997 is fashioned in distinctive titanium panels, a material he also used for later buildings, including the Disney Philharmonic in downtown Los Angeles. Gehry’s work became a marker of large-scale urban gentrification, in counterpoint to the “junk” of Purifoy’s city and the systemic effects of offshore drilling. 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 65 SELECTED WORK: Subhankar Banerjee, Caribou Migration I, 2002 Subhankar Banerjee was born in Calcutta in 1967 and studied electrical engineering in India before moving to the United States in 1990 to complete master’s degrees in physics and computer science at New Mexico State University. Banerjee began a career in science, working first for the Los Alamos National Laboratory and then for the Boeing Company. While living in New Mexico, he joined the Sierra Club and began hiking in the mountains, bringing along a camera and studying photography as a hobby. Then, a major transition turned his career toward the visual arts. As the scholar Finis Dunaway describes, “In the fall of 2000, [Banerjee] visited Churchill, in northern Manitoba, Canada, Subhankar Banerjee lived and worked in the Arctic National to take pictures of polar bears. It was, Banerjee Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska for fourteen months, recalled, ‘an arresting moment. But I also saw too photographing the environment and its inhabitants. many people, each scrambling for pictures. My Bowie High School - El Paso , TX entire being became galvanized with the desire to witness polar bears in a wild landscape untrammeled by tourism or industry.’”28 In response, Banerjee quit his job at Boeing, cashed out his retirement savings, and traveled to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska, where he would live and work for the next fourteen months, photographing the environment and its inhabitants. The ANWR had been established in 1960 and later doubled in size to comprise nearly 20 million acres. While the vast majority of its inland territory was protected ecologically, a small strip along the Beaufort Sea did not maintain the same level of protection. When oil was discovered in this coastal plain, it triggered a decades-long political battle over whether the land should be environmentally protected or drilled for oil. During the early 2000s, President George W. Bush campaigned on a pro-drilling platform, and, along with fellow advocates, including Alaska’s Senator Frank Murkowski, attempted to initiate drilling in the ANWR. Proponents of drilling pointed to its potential economic impact, contending that it could create new jobs and lower the price of oil for consumers, and they argued that it could make the U.S. less reliant on foreign oil. However, opponents of drilling expressed concern about the environmental repercussions of drilling in terms of its impact on the ecosystem as well as on Indigenous people in the area, and they argued that the U.S. should seek ways to become less, not more, reliant on fossil fuels. During this period, Banerjee published a number of his photographs in the book Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, which included texts contributed by environmentalists. The book caught the attention of curators at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which arranged for an exhibition of Banerjee’s arctic photographs to open in spring 2003. As debate about drilling ANWR ensued on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Senator Barbara Boxer held up a copy of Banerjee’s book, citing one of its photographs of a polar bear as evidence of the presence and fragility of life on the Refuge. While supporters of drilling in ANWR were focused largely on economic gains, some pro-drilling advocates also made claims that ANWR was an arctic wilderness and therefore empty and lifeless. To emphasize this point, Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski once compared it to a blank white poster, which he similarly held before his colleagues.29 Boxer, continuing to show Banerjee’s photographs, introduced an amendment to block drilling in ANWR, which passed, narrowly, 52–48. In the years since that vote, the Refuge has wavered between protections and monetization, coming 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 66 closest to drilling when the Department of the Interior officially opened 1.5 million acres of the ANWR to the oil and gas industry on August 17, 2020, in the months leading up to the national presidential election. On January 6, 2021, the federal government sold oil and gas leases in the amount of $14.4 million, a total vastly less than anticipated and funded almost entirely by the state- owned Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority. Two weeks later, on his first day in office, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to place a moratorium on oil and gas extraction in the ANWR, a measure that has subsequently been bolstered by the Interior Department formally suspending oil and gas drilling leases in the area.30 As debate about drilling ANWR ensued on the floor of the U.S. Caribou Migration I is a central image to Senate, Senator Barbara Boxer held up a copy of Banerjee’s book, citing one of its photographs of a polar bear as evidence Banerjee’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge project of the presence and fragility of life on the refuge. and has become one of the most iconic images of the continued struggle to ecologically protect the ANWR. An aerial photograph, like Will Wilson’s Church Rock Spill Evaporation Ponds, it depicts a herd Bowie High School - El Paso , TX of caribou crossing a landscape marked by patches of white snow and blueish-green ice. Formally, the lines created by the herd play against those of the ice and snow, generating a striking, nearly abstract composition, but one that nonetheless reiterates the point that the ANWR is not an empty land but is a fragile ecosystem inhabited by various species. In that sense, the lines generated by the traveling caribou depicted are not only abstract forms, and not only evidence of the caribou’s presence in the arctic, but also show the patterns through which animals move and live within this landscape. In this way, Caribou Migration I invites its viewer to see one community of animals, while also imagining the concerns of food and protection that situate one group of caribou’s migratory concerns within a larger ecosystem. As writer Finis Dunaway notes, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge publication includes further connection between the migration of caribou and the coastal plains that have been the contested site of potential oil drilling. While the caribou depicted in Caribou Migration I are not in that area, they in fact are on their way there, as it is the site where they will calve: “The text and image suggest the caribou’s dependence upon the coastal plain,... and imply that radical alteration of the habitat could threaten the survival of a tremendous herd of animals.”31 In addition to the caribou themselves, a broader understanding of the ecological connections within the ANWR would also recognize the dependence of the Indigenous Gwich’in population of the region on caribou, which provide a key source of Bernadette Demientieff, a member of the Gwich’in Steering food. An ecological perspective on the contested Committee, speaks in support of congressional efforts to space along the Beaufort Sea involves an expanded protect the Arctic in 2019. view. The caribou depicted in Caribou Migration 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 67 I depend on the coastal plain to sustain life generation to generation, and the Gwich’in people depend on the caribou to sustain theirs, even though neither population lives in the coastal plain for the majority of any given year. The protections put in place in June 2021 were, in turn, lauded by Gwich’in leaders, though they acknowledge that the protections will not be secure until further backed by the U.S. legislature. In a statement released by Chief Dana Tizya-Tramm of the Vuntut Gwichin First Nation, “Our work will not stop until our lands are permanently protected through legislation.”32 SELECTED WORK: Vik Muniz, Marat (Sebastião), from Pictures of Garbage, 2008 Vik Muniz was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1961 and is an artist and photographer whose practice has been based in both New York City and Rio de Janeiro since the 1980s. Having initially worked in advertising following his high school studies in Brazil, Muniz moved to the United States in his early twenties, working odd jobs in Chicago and New York before establishing his career, first in sculpture, Bowie High School - El Paso , TX and, more famously, in photography. Muniz’s art has been widely celebrated by art critics and the general public, making him one of the most broadly recognizable artists working today. Muniz is best known for recreating famous photographs and works of art using unexpected materials. With Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter and Jelly) of 1999, for instance, Muniz first “painted” replicas of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic painting Mona Lisa (1503), using only jelly on the left side of the composition and using only peanut butter on the right side. His final work is a photograph made of these side-by-side compositions. As a further art historical reference, Double Mona Lisa is part of a larger series by Muniz titled “After Warhol,” in this case nodding to the fact that the Pop artist Andy Warhol created Vik Muniz with his Perfect Strangers photographs, a project a silk-screened side-by-side double portrait of the for MTA on 72nd Street, 2016 Mona Lisa, in addition to contemporary icons such By Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York - as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. 72nd Street: Vik Muniz, Perfect Strangers, CC BY 2.0, https://commons. wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54281190 Another of Muniz’s replications, Action Photo, after Hans Namuth, used chocolate syrup to refashion an iconic documentary photograph by Hans Namuth in 1950 that depicts the postwar American artist Jackson Pollock at work in his studio. Like other Abstract Expressionist painters of the postwar period, Pollock was recognized for the uniqueness of his abstract style of painting, and Namuth’s photographs played an integral part in communicating the exact kind of dripping, splashing, and brushing techniques that Pollock used to create his paintings. Through further tongue-in- cheek playfulness, the material—chocolate syrup—that Muniz used to create this and other works is both a 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 68 single, dark, shiny color that mimics the format of Namuth’s black-and-white photographs and also a material that is poured, like Pollock’s paint. Much of the interest and pleasure that viewers draw from Muniz’s photographs derives from their knowledge and memory of the original works that he copies. Earlier in his career, he developed this role of memory even more forcefully through a series called “The Best of Life,” for which he would sketch, from his own memory, well-known photographs from Life magazine and then re- photograph his recreation, in effect creating a photograph of a (memory) drawing of a photograph. A waste picker in Brazil with collected cans and bottles. These memory renderings include JFK Jr. Saluting His Father’s Coffin, Man Stopping Tank in Beijing, Kiss at Times Square, and Man on the Moon, the same image that is also referenced in Allora and Calzadilla’s Land Mark (Foot Prints). In a 1988 interview, Muniz explained that his drawings often require several attempts before they begin to mimic the original photographs. Once his drawings reach this point, he photographs and prints them “with the same halftone screen the original pictures were printed on. People thought they were seeing bad Bowie High School - El Paso , TX reproductions, [but]... they were convinced by the photographs because they have the same syntax as the real photos.”33 Thus, unlike his later projects using whimsical materials like peanut butter and chocolate syrup, “The Best of Life” depended on the cultural memory of well-known works of art, while not tipping its hand and immediately giving away Muniz’s artifice. They are deceptive works, in both the minor alterations made to the original photographic images from Life and in the manner that they disguise the blending of different media—presenting a photographic image, which is, in fact, a photograph of a drawing. “The Best of Life” is a series that plays a game in order for its viewer to be more reflective about the flood of images that comes across magazine pages and screens on a daily basis, suggesting questions like: “Who made this image?” “How did they make it?” And “why should I trust it? Marat (Sebastião) is a photograph from the series “Pictures of Garbage,” which brings together a similar kind of critical questioning as his earlier “Best of Life” series. In 2008, Muniz began a collaboration with garbage pickers in Jardim Gramacho, a large dump near Rio de Janeiro, which involved photographing the pickers in the poses of celebrated artworks and creating fabrications of those photographs using trash from the dump. Muniz’s process was documented in Lucy Walker’s film Waste Land, which was released widely in 2010. The impoverished garbage pickers, called catadores, are among hundreds of thousands of workers in Brazil who comb through waste to extract salable materials. According to the New York Times, “This informal workforce... are the reason Brazil, with only a few municipal recycling programs, manages to reclaim a huge percentage of its trash.”34 Marat (Sebastião) is another of Muniz’s multi-step photographs. It began with an outdoor photograph of Tião Santos, a man depicted in Waste Land as an organizer among the catadores of Jardim Gramacho. On site one day, Muniz spotted Santos near a bathtub and proposed that he pose in the manner of the French painter Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, which is a 1793 painting dramatizing the murder of the French Revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat in his bath. Muniz’s photograph was then used as the basis for creating the same composition on a much larger scale. Collecting waste from the landfill, Muniz assembled garbage on the floor of a nearby building and positioned his camera above the trash to create another photograph that serves as the final artwork—a photograph mimicking a photograph, which itself mimics an eighteenth- century painting. 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 69  Muniz then sold his works at auction, giving back a portion of the profit to the catadores depicted in his works. In the artist’s words, “I’m at this point in my career where I’m trying to step away from the realm of fine arts, because I think it’s a very exclusive, very restrictive place to be. What I want to be able to do is to change the lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day.”35 The result is a series of photographs that imitate not only David, but other renowned European artists, including Caravaggio, Goya, Millet, and Picasso. As a positive outcome, Muniz’s photographs, alongside Walker’s film, have raised awareness about the condition of catadores in Brazil and the need to reuse and recycle waste in Brazil and Catadores look for items with resale value in a garbage heap around the world, and they have provided direct in Brazil. payment for the involvement of the garbage pickers in Muniz’s project. As an art series, however, “Pictures of Garbage” has also drawn critical questions about why the images of historical European artists are used to represent catadores, who struggle to survive in a country that Bowie High School - El Paso , TX had been under the colonial rule of that same continent during the period when most of the original paintings were made. It is an ambiguity in Muniz’s project that is ultimately unresolved and which raises provocative questions about what values are most important in evaluating the ethics and real-world impact of environmental artworks. SECTION III SUMMARY formative works of eco art was Rice/Tree/ Documentary photography has played a Burial of 1968, which she created first in 6 foundational role in establishing a tradition Sullivan County, New York, and second at of art that records and communicates the Artpark in Lewiston, New York. environmental damages of pollution and 6 Wheatfield—A Confrontation involved multiple extraction. steps, which included Denes planting and Contemporary artists continue to address growing wheat on two acres of land in Lower 6 pollution in their artwork. For some, there is a Manhattan. She also photographed the site and tendency to dramatize pollution. performed for the camera by walking through the wheatfield. 6 The artists addressed in this section address pollution and extraction through multi-layered 6 Wheatfield—A Confrontation was later projects in which multiple activities and incorporated into an exhibition titled “The perspectives converge. International Art Show for the End of World Hunger,” organized by the Minnesota Museum Selected Work: Agnes Denes, of Art, where visitors could take home seeds Wheatfield—A Confrontation: Battery harvested from Denes’s wheatfield. Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan— 6 Following Wheatfield, Denes went on to create With Agnes Denes Standing in the Field, many impactful ecological artworks around the world, such as her acclaimed Tree Mountain in 1982 Finland. 6 Agnes Denes was one of the founding artists of contemporary ecological art. One of her 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 70 Selected Work: Noah Purifoy, Offshore live within the arctic landscape and ecosystem. Drilling, 1995 6 Recent political developments have provided 6 Purifoy was a Southern California-based protections for the ANWR, but the Indigenous artist who worked across many fields of Gwich’in, who rely on caribou of the ANWR practice, ranging from furniture design to arts for survival, are still seeking more secure administration to creating junk sculpture. environmental protection of the region. 6 In 1966, he was a co-creator of the exhibition Selected Work: Vik Muniz, Marat 66 Signs of Neon, which traveled around the (Sebastião), from Pictures of Garbage, United States showing sculptures made from the found refuse of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. 2008 6 Vik Muniz is a Brazilian-born, New York- 6 During the 1980s, he served as a member of based artist whose photographs have been the California Arts Council. widely shown and celebrated throughout the 6 From 1989 until his death in 2004, he lived in world. the Mojave Desert in Joshua Tree, California, 6 Muniz recreates famous artworks by other building artworks in his Outdoor Desert artists using unexpected materials, like Museum, which includes Offshore Drilling. peanut butter or chocolate syrup, and then 6 Offshore Drilling is an artwork whose shape photographs the creation. These photographs and materials recall the drilling rigs located are the works that he presents to the public. off the coast of California that have created 6 Much of the interest and pleasure that viewers Bowie High School - El Paso , TX numerous oil spills. The found, junk materials draw from Muniz’s photographs derives from of the artwork also connect the industry of oil their knowledge and memory of the original extraction and refinement to the environmental works that he copies. It is an expectation that pollution that disproportionately affects poorer he has played with in his series “The Best of neighborhoods and communities of color. Life,” which used his own drawings of famous Selected Work: Subhankar Banerjee, photographs that look authentic but in fact have minor differences from the originals. Caribou Migration I, 2002 6 Subhankar Banerjee is an artist, environmental 6 Marat (Sebastião), Pictures of Garbage scholar, and advocate who transitioned from a is a photograph from the series “Pictures career as a scientist to pursue his passion for of Garbage,” in which Muniz recreates nature photography. compositions of famous European paintings with the help of garbage pickers in Rio 6 Caribou Migration I is part of a larger series de Janeiro and garbage from the Jardim of photographs that Banerjee took of life in the Gramacho landfill. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). 6 Marat (Sebastião) is based on Jacques-Louis 6 His photographs of the ANWR became part David’s Death of Marat, which is a 1793 of a political battle to protect the Refuge from painting dramatizing the murder of the French oil drilling and were shown on the floor of the Revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat in his U.S. Senate. bath. 6 Caribou Migration I is a photograph that 6 Muniz sold the photographs in the “Pictures dispels a false myth that the ANWR is empty of Garbage” series at auction and gave back a and lifeless. By showing a herd of Caribou portion of the profit to the garbage pickers who moving through the land, it provides poetic posed in his pictures. evidence of the patterns through which animals 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 71  Section IV Ecological Systems of Knowledge Beginning in the 1960s, artists interested in both ecology and informational systems started to think of artworks as a kind of ecosystem. While ecology as a field of modern science is approximately a century and a half old, the notion of an ecosystem was conceived considerably later. First coined in 1935, “ecosystems” initially designated interconnections defined primarily by the agency of animal organisms, particularly through the model of the food chain. However, following the conclusion of the Second World War and the rise of a field of information science called cybernetics, Bowie High School - El Paso , TX ecosystems were understood through robust systems theories derived from new computing technologies. The most prominent of these is the paradigm of the “steady- state.” This steady-state ecosystem was characterized by a consistent order that was assumed to be both predictable and unchanging over time. Steady-state ecology remained the dominant scientific model and means to imagine global connectivity during the 1960s and the rise of the environmental movement. These basic assumptions about ecosystems started to be challenged in the years that followed, when a Artist and writer Jack Burnham wrote an influential piece of art criticism published in 1968 on “Systems Esthetics.” picture of ecological change as unpredictable and even chaotic overtook the previous assumption of unwavering stability. Based on longer-term studies, among experts in the late twentieth century, the scientists realized that ecosystems do not have a core ideas of these fields filtered into a more general natural and timeless steady state, but instead consist perspective on the planet among artists and the general of a balance of relationships that are invariably altered public alike. Artists, in particular, began to experiment over time by the influx of unpredictable factors. Part with the ways in which works of art might also be of the debate at that time turned on whether ecological conceived of as self-contained systems while also systems were “open” or “closed.” Open systems being part of larger systems. These tendencies were are those that can incorporate new elements and be grouped together as “Systems Esthetics” by the curator structured, changed, and reinvigorated over time. and art historian Jack Burnham in an influential piece Closed systems, by contrast, are limited to the original of art criticism published in 1968.36 In the works conditions of the system. discussed in this section of the resource guide, from the early 1970s to the early 2010s, we see an evolving While many of the conversations about complicated perspective on how open or closed the ecological and highly specialized fields of knowledge like systems of art are and the role that new technologies ecology, cybernetics, and systems theory took place might play in the creation and display of visual art. 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 72 SELECTED WORK: Helen and Newton Harrison, Shrimp Farm, Survival Piece #2, 1971 Helen and Newton Harrison were art collaborators and partners in life. Helen Mayer Harrison (1927–2018) was born in Queens, New York, and studied English and education before pursuing a teaching career in the 1940s. Newton Harrison (1932–2022) was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Helen and Newton were married in 1953 and lived abroad in Florence, Italy, from 1957 to 1960. During the first two decades of their marriage, Newton Harrison worked as a solo artist, but beginning in the late 1960s, the Harrisons began working together on a collaborative art practice that lasted throughout the remainder of their careers. Vital in establishing the activist engagement and informed interdisciplinarity of much of the contemporary eco art produced in the last half century, the Harrisons were true pioneers. Bowie High School - El Paso , TX From the outset of their collaboration as artists, the Harrisons produced works that had a tangible impact on the environment. An early example is Making Earth, a work they first performed in 1970 and would re-create many times. The work consists, quite simply Helen and Newton Harrison were vital in establishing but profoundly, of the production of rich soil. “After the activist engagement and informed interdisciplinarity understanding that topsoil was endangered world-wide,” of much of the contemporary eco art produced in the last they commented, “we made earth many times. The half century. first was sand, clay, sewage sludge, leaf material, and Photo Credit: The Harrison Studio chicken, cow and horse manure. These elements were gathered, mixed, watered, mixed again and again over a 4-month period until it had a rich, forest-floor smell and could be tasted.”37 While early artworks like Making Earth were carried out largely in private, the Harrisons introduced their practice to much larger audiences with a series of works titled the “Survival Pieces,” which were produced for museums from 1970 to 1972. For each of these survival works, the Harrisons fashioned a living ecosystem for a predetermined period of time. Shrimp Farm, Survival Piece #2 was staged at an exhibition titled “Art and Technology” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which ran from May 10 to August 29, 1971, as the culmination of a notoriously expensive and generally unsuccessful program (1967–1971) to pair artists with the research and development departments of corporations in order to create collaborative work. However, the Harrisons’ contribution to LACMA’s show was created without corporate expertise and has since become the single work that many scholars identify as the point of transition from Land art to more ecologically conscientious practices. This work, also called Notations of the Ecosystem of the Western Salt Works with the Inclusion of Brine Shrimp, consisted of four ponds of salt water and brine shrimp located outdoors on LACMA’s campus. Against the tendency of earlier Earthworks of the Land art movement to expend large outlays of energy in carving up the landscape and introduce industrially produced materials into these environments, works by 2024–2025 Art Resource Guide Revised Page June 17, 2024 73 the Harrisons and many artists after them have claimed a distinction, in Newton Harrison’s words, between “[using] earth as material” and “[dealing] with ecology in the full sense of the term.”38 The Harrisons’ Shrimp Farm was conceived, in fact, as a direct response to Robert Smithson’s recently completed Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. As the story goes, when Newton Harrison first met Smithson, they talked about the tendency of the water around Spiral Jetty to periodically adopt a reddish hue, an effect of the carotene produced by algae in the Great Salt Lake. The higher the salt level in the water, the greater the red hue produced by these algae would be. With this tendency in mind, Harrison proposed to introduce brine shrimp at Spiral Jetty. The brine shrimp would feed upon the algae and could be harvested at the site. It was a suggestion that apparently held little interest for Smithson. The artist Robert Smithson became best known for his Land art, in particular his work Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake In response, Newton and Helen Harrison decided Bowie High School - El Paso , TX in Utah. that if they could not turn Spiral Jetty into a shrimp farm, they would make their own in Los Angeles instead. The work they created for “Art and Technology” employed different levels of salt in each of the four ponds outside of LACMA, creating an effect of subtle shifts in color from one pond to the next. Shrimp Farm also resulted in an actual harvest of shrimp from the ponds at the end of the exhibition. In these and other works in their “Survival” series, the Harrisons sought to create living ecosystems for such organisms as fish, trees, potatoes, salad greens, and worms. By creating highly specific and localized living conditions, the Harrisons’ “Survival” works highlight the interrelations among organisms and the climate conditions required to sustain life in simplified, enclosed environments or “systems.” But as their practice would come to demonstrate, the idea of any ecosystem being truly closed was a fallacy that relied precisely on the short-term constraints of the “Survival” pieces, which were created only for two- or three-month periods of time. A significant change in the Harrisons’ approach arrived through the formation of a multifaceted wor