Gender and Eco-Art

FIRST THINGS FIRST . . . .

Images of climate disaster are increasingly pervasive in our visual culture, becoming the new normal as contemporary society continues to produce excess greenhouse gas emissions and rely on fossil fuel economies that devastate the ecosystems on which humans and nonhumans alike depend on.

Art history has a vital role to play in the broader fight against eco-cide. First, we must recognize that images of nature are not innocent formalistic expressions, but rather are part and parcel of the ideological justification underlying the current geologic epoch of the Anthropocene. Historic images of the sublime, the picturesque and other politically dubious expressions of the “culture-nature dualism” give cover to powerful forces who insist that humanity and nature are in perpetual war. More hopefully, we must also acknowledge that there exists a counterhistory of artists and artworks from various regions and social milieu, which seeks to reimagine humanity’s relationship to nature in ways that are sustainable, co-eval and non-extractive. The term “co-eval” is used in the ecocritical sense of recognizing all living entities, human and more-than-human, as existing with equal intrinsic value.[1] Applied to this eco-art lesson plan, co-evalness describes an ethic shared among artists and artworks that engages nature as an active collaborator. The work of artists like Nancy Holt and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, for example, operates in sync with environmental processes, emphasizing interdependence with ecological time rather than separation from it. I hope this clarifies why the term appears in this context, and how its specific meaning is distinct from, yet complementary to, the attributes of non-extraction and sustainability that I associate with a counterhistory of art.

Thematizing “gender” as an enduring, contentious problematic in the wider history of environmental images provides educators with an entry point into these larger topics. It is impossible and unwise to separate gender as such from a host of other interrelated social categories, such as race, culture, nationhood, class, and more. This three-part lesson considers how gender provides a locus of creative and political countervisualities, to borrow Nicholas Mirzoeff’s term, against climate apocalypse.

Gender helps us see how representations of nature are often bound up in cultural associations with femininity, masculinity, and power. For example, European visual traditions have long feminized the landscape as fertile, passive, or nurturing, while framing conquest over nature as a masculine act of domination. Conversely, feminist and women artists have disrupted these tropes, reclaiming the environment as a site for embodied presence, co-creative agency, and ecological care. Looking at environmental images through a gendered lens also makes visible the often-overlooked systems of reproductive labor and maintenance—frequently coded as “women’s work”—that sustain both human life and the environment. This lens allows us to connect questions of identity and social justice directly to the ways artists represent, perform, and intervene in the natural world.

In what follows, this lesson foregrounds a collection of feminist and women artists whose practices reveal the deep entanglements of gender and ecology. It focuses on three clusters of case studies. First, “Women in the Land Art Movement” highlights artists such as Nancy Holt, Agnes Denes, Ana Mendieta, and Judy Chicago, who challenged the male-dominated history of earthworks by reshaping scale, process, and embodied engagement with the land. Second, “Gendered Performances of Nature” turns to artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Wendy Red Star, and Wangechi Mutu, who stage performances and interventions that expose systems of labor, colonial stereotyping, and posthuman possibilities. Finally, “Ecological Repair Against the Anthropocene” examines the work of Patricia Johanson, Jackie Brookner, Lynne Hull, and LaToya Ruby Frazier. Their creative projects model how eco-art can directly remediate ecosystems, support nonhuman species, or bear witness to environmental injustice in human communities.

[1] The term means “to be contemporary with” or “to coexist with” and originates in anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983).

Background Readings

Art and Artists

Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century, New York: George Braziller, 1968.

—, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum (1968): 29-35.

Agnes Denes, “Notes on Eco-Logic: Environmental Artwork, Visual Philosophy and Global Perspective,” Leonardo 26.5 (1993): 387-395.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Flint is Family In Three Acts, Göttingen: Steidl, 2022.

Erin L. McCutcheon, “Incorporados: The Art of Ana Mendieta,” Elements 1.1 (2005): 17-23.

Nancy Holt and Hikmet Sidney Loe, “History of the Sun Tunnels Near Lucin, Utah,” Great Salt Lake: An Overview of Change, Salt Lake City: Utah Geological Survey, 2002: 573-580.

Marika Preziuso, “Is America Really Full? A conversation with Wangechi Mutu,” Transition 129 (2020): 26-45.

Ben Tufnell, In Land: Writings Around Land Art and Its Legacies, Winchester UK: Zer0 Books, 2019.

Eco-Art

Suzaan Boettger, “The Ground of Earthen Sculpture,” Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002: 23-44.

Mark A. Cheetham, Landscape into Eco-Art: Articulations of Nature Since the ‘60s, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

T.J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017.

Francesca Ferrando, “A feminist genealogy of posthuman aesthetics in the visual arts,” Palgrave Communications 10.1 (November 2016): 1-12.

Barbara C. Matilsky, Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’ Interpretations and Solutions, New York: Rizzoli, 1992.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” Public Culture 26:2 (2014): 213-232.

Kate Morris, “Centering: Site-Specific and Land-Based Art Practices,” Shifting Grounds: Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2019: 81-114.

Ruth Wallen, “Ecological Art: A Call for Visionary Intervention in A Time of Crisis.” Leonardo 45.3 (2012): 234-242.

Eco-Theory

Paul J. Crutzen, “The Anthropocene,” Earth System Science in the Anthropocene, eds. Ehlers, E., Krafft, T, Berlin: Springer (2006): 13-18.

Yrjö Haila, “Beyond the Nature-Culture Dualism,” Biology and Philosophy 15 (2000): 155-75.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Glossary

• Anthropocene – A proposed geological period (literally translated from the Greek as “Age of the Human”) that begins in 1784 with James Watt’s design of the steam engine. The Anthropocene is characterized by human-driven changes to the planet, including climate change, increase of the human population, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
• Anaesthetics of the Anthropocene – According to Nicholas Mirzoeff, the Anthropocene’s “conquest of nature” is supported by art, media, and visual culture. With the advent of industrialization, much Western art has acclimatized us to accept the destruction of nature and the march of progress for centuries.
• Eco-Art – A type of art-making that reimagines the work of art using the values and principles of ecology, such as biodiversity, sustainability, environmental remediation. Unlike traditional artworks that picture natural phenomena, eco-art tends to involve the viewer as a participant, utilize scientific research methods, or otherwise dissolve the aesthetic autonomy of art.
• Landscape Art – According to WJT Mitchell, landscape is a medium of representation and a cultural practice that uses images of nature to communicate ideas about the human and the non-human. In art history, “landscape” is typically taken to be a European style of painting or drawing originating in the Renaissance that imagines natural settings apart from a Christian worldview, subjecting the physical world to incipient discourses of imperialism, science, and early capitalism.
• Nature-culture dualism – Within Western epistemologies of philosophy, science, anthropology, or political theory, the nature-culture divide is a foundational concept. The nature-culture divide assumes that the totality of human societies, or “Culture,” exists separately and apart from nature. “Nature” encompasses all physical aspects of the world, including plants, animals, landscapes, and phenomena not created by humans.
• Settler colonialism – Settler colonialism is a system in which outsiders take control of land, displace Indigenous peoples, and replace them with their own communities and ways of life.
• Decolonization – Decolonization is both a material and symbolic effort by which colonized peoples regain political sovereignty and independence from colonial powers.
• Slow violence – Gradual, typically invisible process of harm. It unfolds over time and space, dispersed across communities and environments rather than through immediate, spectacular events.
• Social reproduction theory – The concept of “social reproduction” originated in second-wave feminist debates of the 1970s, calling attention to the unpaid, often invisible labor—child-rearing, housekeeping, tending to the sick, romantic forms of care—required to sustain capitalist society. As Marxist Feminists have pointed out, these socially reproductive tasks have historically been assigned to women, particularly racial/ethnic minorities and migrants.
• The sublime – Developed by early modern thinkers like Burke, Kant and others, the sublime is a type of art that is distinct from the ideal of beauty that characterized European aesthetics. Typically the sublime refers to images of extreme natural phenomena (thunder storms, volcanic eruptions) that elicit passionate feelings in the spectator: astonishment, amazement, terror, or awe.
• Systems art – Systems art emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, when artists started making works that functioned like living or technological systems, emphasizing connections, feedback loops, and relationships between parts and wholes.
• Posthumanism – A philosophical system emerging in the late 20th century that critiques the hierarchical presuppositions of humanism and anthropocentrism, instead advocating for environmentalism, deconstructionism and an ethic of inclusiveness toward plant-based organisms, non-human animals, machine-human hybrids, artificial intelligence, and more.

CONTENT SUGGESTIONS

Key questions for the lecture:

• How have societies envisioned relationships between humanity and the non-human world?
• In what ways have feminist and women artists reframed the natural landscape—not just as scenery or resource, but as a space tied to embodiment, care, or resistance?
• What happens when a work of art ceases to be a representation, and instead involves itself in the world as an active agent as “eco-art”? What are the strengths and limits of this approach?
• How might examining environmental art through the lens of gender also open up conversations about other intersecting identities—such as race, sexuality, or class—in shaping how nature is represented?
• What are the responsibilities of artists and art historians on a rapidly warming planet?

Timeline                                                                                                                                                            

In one hour and fifteen-minute lecture you should be able to cover the following:

• Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-76.
• Nancy Holt, Holes of Light, 1973.
• Nancy Holt, Views Through a Sand Dune, 1972.
• Agnes Denes, Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule—11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years, 1992-96.
• Ana Mendieta, Untitled from Silueta series, 1973-80.
• Judy Chicago, Atmospheres, 1968-74 (smoke and firework performances).
• Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside and Inside, 1973.
• Wendy Red Star, Spring from the Four Seasons photo series, 2006.
• Wangechi Mutu, Water Woman, 2017.
• Patricia Johanson, Fair Park Lagoon, 1981-86.
• Jackie Brookner, Prima Lingua, 1996/2001.
• Lynne Hull, Lightning Raptor Roost, 1990.
• LaToya Ruby Frazier, Shea Brushing Zion’s Teeth with Bottled Water In Her Bathroom, Flint, Michigan, 2016-17. From the photo series Flint is Family, 2016-20

Click for images: Slide Presentation

 

Introduction to the topic

Art both reflects and shapes our relationships to the environment. This lesson on Gender and Eco-Art asks students to consider how gender, race, class, and other identity categories influence artistic representations of the natural world, and how these representations are tied to systems of power. Combining eco-critical art history with feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches, it offers a framework for teaching art in a way that foregrounds values of diversity, environmental justice, and historical accountability.

To begin, several key terms provide the conceptual foundation for this lesson. Landscape art is an established genre that, from ancient societies onward, depicts nature as an object for religious expression, aesthetic contemplation, national identification, economic resources, or territorial control. Time and again, nature becomes a screen for projecting human fantasies about how the world should be. Whether in Chinese handscrolls, Hudson River School paintings, or monumental earthworks, studying landscape images from the perspective of power and identity means we must ask who controls land, who or what is displaced from it, and how “nature” is culturally constructed to support various ideological agendas.

Climate change, arising in extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, and forest fires, is a key development motivating art historians to view cultural constructions of nature with a more critical eye. The term Anthropocene, popularized by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000, captures our current geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant influence on Earth’s climate and ecosystems. Visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff introduces the phrase anaesthetics of the Anthropocene to critique how artwork, such as Claude Monet’s Impressionist paintings of London fog, can dull our senses to the ongoing ecological crisis. Such art often makes environmental degradation appear abstract, distant, or even beautiful. Likewise, historians like WJT Mitchell have argued that historical aesthetic categories such as the Sublime and the Picturesque, which celebrate nature’s grandeur or harmonious composition, must be reexamined for the ways they both inspire awe and mask real histories of exploitation.

A critical touchstone in this lesson is the concept of the nature-culture dualism. Since the Enlightenment, philosophers and artists in the West have reinforced the belief that human culture exists separately from nature. In this view, humanity belongs on the top of an existential hierarchy, valued above nonhuman animals, plants or other elemental entities. The nature-culture binary has justified harmful extractive practices and reinforced social hierarchies, where undesirable or lesser populations are placed on the side of “nature.” This binary reappears especially through settler colonialism, a process beginning in the 14^th and 15^th centuries whereby European societies appropriated land and displaced Indigenous peoples while circulating images of nature in the “New World” as empty, unpeopled, and ripe for cultivation. In our contemporary moment, artists struggle to confront global capitalism’s production of waste through the concept of slow violence. Coined by literary historian Rob Nixon, slow violence describes a type of environmental harm, originating in land-use policy and the deregulation of business interests, that unfolds gradually and out of sight, manifesting through pollution, the rise of economic “sacrifice zones,” habitat destruction, or climate change’s long-term effects.

Another intellectual pillar for thematizing gender and eco-art is the influence of modern civil rights and social justice movements in industrialized democratic societies. The Women’s Movement fueled feminist critiques of the exploitation of women, showing that women commonly are positioned as or in unrefined environments, influencing ecofeminist art and theory. The American Indian Movement and Indigenous activists have long challenged EuroAmerican narratives that romanticize or otherize the wilderness for instrumental purposes, by asserting alternative visual practices rooted in sacred and reciprocal worldviews. The Black Arts Movement sought to promote the cultural and political agency of African Americans exposing how environmental misuse was linked to racial injustices. Since the 1960s, the environmental movement has drawn upon creative means to raise public awareness. Campaigns for conservation and environmental restoration emphasize the interdependency of humankind on non-human natural systems, shaping artistic responses to ecology and environmental topics.

Parallel to these currents, major intellectual movements have transformed art historical analysis of the environment. Gender and sexuality studies scholars interrogate how norms around masculinity, femininity, and queerness often rely upon reified, binaristic visions of the natural and unnatural. Postcolonialism reveals how imperial expansion and resource extraction by Western powers was justified and naturalized through visual culture. Eco-criticism treats cultural artifacts as complex interpretations of environmental change, informing the creation of ecocritical art history.

Integrating these concepts and histories, the lesson on Gender and Eco-Art critically evaluates how legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy inflect artistic depictions of the natural world. Its organization into three themes – Women in the Land Art Movement; Gendered Performances of Nature; and Ecological Repair Against the Anthropocene – demonstrate how gender differentially informs artistic strategies, from site-based works to rituals to collaborative projects for ecological repair. In short, we ought to remember that images of nature are never neutral—they are embedded in/expressive of power relations, social identities, and struggles over land and resources.

 

Women in the Land Art Movement

The Land Art movement, also known as Earth Art, emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as artists began creating site-specific works using the land itself as both medium and site. Rejecting the institutional confines of galleries and museums, these works were often monumental, located in remote landscapes, and designed to engage directly with natural materials like dirt or stone. This shift challenged traditional art market systems by producing works that could not easily be sold or commodified.

Several sociohistorical currents converged to give rise to Land Art. The 1960s counterculture and back-to-the-land movements fueled a renewed interest in rural living and ecological consciousness, inspiring artists to work outside urban centers. At the same time, developments in late modern art—particularly Minimalism’s emphasis on reduced geometric form and large scale, Conceptualism’s prioritization of ideas over objects, and Performance Art’s focus on action and embodiment—expanded the possibilities for site-based and process-driven works. The growing environmental movement in the United States, marked by events such as the first Earth Day in 1970, heightened public concern about pollution, resource depletion, and wilderness preservation. The rise of the Women’s Movement and feminist art also contributed to the climate in which women artists began to challenge patriarchal exclusion from major art movements, reframing women’s relationship to the environment as both political and personal.

Despite their substantial contributions, women artists were long marginalized in the historiography of Land Art, overshadowed by male figures such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. Critics often misinterpreted women’s works—sometimes smaller in scale or more ephemeral in nature—as less significant. Correcting this bias is essential for a fuller understanding of the movement.

Among the most notable women practitioners, Nancy Holt created Sun Tunnels (1973–76) in Utah’s Great Basin Desert, a monumental installation of four massive concrete cylinders aligned to the solstice sunrises and sunsets, with drilled holes mapping constellations. The work merges cosmic time with human perception. Holt’s Holes of Light (1973) used circular apertures in a gallery to track the movement of light and shadow, while Views Through a Sand Dune (1972) used a circular porthole in a sandy beach to trigger embodied meditations on framing and perception. Agnes Denes, another key figure, realized Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule (1992–96) in Finland, planting a forest of 11,000 trees in a mathematically precise pattern designed to be maintained for four centuries, merging ecological restoration with monumental geometry.

Other women artists embraced more performative or nonrepresentational approaches to Land Art. Ana Mendieta relocated from Cuba to the US with her family fleeing the Castro regime. Mendieta’s Untitled (1976) from the Silueta Series created body-shaped impressions in the earth that she called earth-body works. She filled them with natural materials or carved holes into the ground, fusing identity, ritual, and landscape. Diverging from Minimalism’s de-emphasis of the artist’s social background, Mendieta created the Siluetas partly to convey the loss and nostalgia for her Cuban heritage. Famous for her Dinner Party (1974–1979) installation which presented a transhistorical journey of significant women figures around the world, Judy Chicago made numerous artworks that sought to restore the place of women in nature and repair the harmful nature-culture divide. Chicago’s Atmospheres (1968–74) staged outdoor performances using colored smoke to “feminize” and soften harsh landscapes in Southern California, creating ephemeral interventions that, like much feminist art of the time, sought to reclaim public space, redirecting attention to how the atmosphere itself is gendered.

Gendered Performances of Nature

By the late 1960s, some artists began working with what critic Jack Burnham described as systems art, a term he coined in a 1968Artforum essay to describe art engaging with ecological, social, and technological systems rather than producing static objects. Burnham’s ideas were shaped by the Austrian biologist Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a founder of general systems theory, and by Norbert Wiener, whose work in cybernetics explored communication and control in both machines and living beings.

Systems art intersects with gender and environmental art through its resonance with feminist social reproduction theory, which examines the undervalued labor—often performed by women—that sustains life. This theoretical convergence emphasized maintenance, care, and cyclical processes as valid artistic strategies. Mierle Laderman Ukeles brought this vision to life with her Maintenance Art Manifesto (1969), which declared everyday acts of upkeep as art, and her performance Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside and Inside (1973), in which she cleaned the steps and floors of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. By visibilizing forms of maintenance work, Ukeles critiqued both the gendered division of labor and the institutional hierarchies of the art world. Her performance put the artist in the same occupational plane as custodial staff, as well as evoking the analytical position of the environmental scientist who tracks cycles and feedback loops in ecological systems.

Decolonial critiques also reshaped understandings of environmental art, challenging the settler-colonial notion of wilderness as an unpeopled space. It reinforced institutional critiques associated with Conceptual Art that questioned the unconscious biases and material inequities that support art institutions like museums and galleries, and which determine what artworks (and by extension, which communities and demographics) get to be seen as valuable for the public. The American Indian Movement foregrounded Indigenous sovereignty, while postcolonial theory analyzed how exoticism and “noble savage” tropes perpetuated colonial ideologies. Wendy Red Star’s Spring from The Four Seasons (2006) engages these critiques through staged, photographic self-portraits in artificial “natural” settings. Wearing traditional Apsáalooke (Crow) regalia against kitschy backdrops, she both inhabits and undermines stereotypes of Native women, revealing the artificiality of nature images that can exist in EuroAmerican museums of natural history. Native people have been treated by scientific institutions just as fake and sterile as the plastic animals that populate the life habitat setting she places herself in.

Posthumanism, a philosophy which questions rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds, offers another framework for understanding the intersection of gender, decolonial critique, and environmental art. Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan visual artist based in New York. Mutu’s Water Woman (2017), a bronze sculpture of a hybrid mermaid-like figure, blurs distinctions between human, aquatic, and mythic forms. The work activates tropes of otherness as well as ancient Egyptian iconography of composite human-animal deities. Mutu draws upon ancient and contemporary sources, such as science fiction of Black writers like Octavia Butler, inviting viewers to consider interspecies entanglement and the collapse of the nature-culture divide. Mutu’s work has been described as Afrofuturistic for its formal experimentation and visionary depiction of Black futurity.

Ecological Repair Against the Anthropocene

In the Anthropocene, the scale of human impact on the planet has become undeniable. Some artists turned toward direct intervention in threatened ecosystems. Eco-art, as defined by scholars such as Ruth Wallen and Barbara C. Matilsky, encompasses works that actively restore, remediate, or protect ecological systems while fostering public appreciation of environmental issues. The related concept of “ecovention”—a fusion of ecology and intervention—refers specifically to art-based projects that produce measurable ecological benefits.

Patricia Johanson’s Fair Park Lagoon (1981–86) in Dallas, Texas, exemplifies this approach. Designed in the form of a Texas Fern and duck-potato plant, the large-scale sculpted landscape not only restored an abandoned lagoon but also provided habitat for wildlife and recreational space for the public. Jackie Brookner’s Prima Lingua (1996/2001), a large tongue-shaped sculpture planted with wetland vegetation, filters water while evoking bodily forms, underscoring the interconnectedness of humanity, water and environmental health. Lynne Hull’s Lightning Raptor Roost (1990) combines sculptural assemblage with animal rights. Blending into the natural landscape rather than calling attention to itself, Lightning Raptor Root provides artificial nesting structures for endangered bird species, informed by the artist’s research into animal behavior and wildlife conservation.

With images of climate havoc becoming more ubiquitous on social-media platforms, artists are growing sensitive to the fact that contemporary society is structured by a polluter-industrial complex, a paradigm in which waste and industrial byproducts are generated and distributed unevenly thanks to the business-friendly policy arena that operates in the West. Social documentary photographers have focused on creatively representing what literary historian Rob Nixon terms slow violence—forms of environmental harm that unfold gradually, invisibly, and which disproportionately affects marginalized, “fenceline” communities. LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint is Family (2016–20) is a multi-year photographic documentation of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Initially commissioned by Elle magazine and later expanded into a book and exhibitions, the project follows three generations of Black women in the Cobb family over several years. Through intimate portraiture and landscape compositions, Frazier maps multiple scales of the human and environmental costs of infrastructural neglect. Her aerial images of polluted riverways evoke the “toxic sublime,” and her close-up portraits of residents drinking bottled water to avoid the risk of contamination, invite slow looking and unsettled empathy, underscoring the invisibility of many environmental risks to the health of America’s children.

Taken together, these three sections reveal how gender and eco-art intersect across diverse artistic strategies—from monumental interventions in the land to intimate performances and small-scale acts of care. Studying these works in an advanced undergraduate classroom gives students occasion to understand that representations of nature are never neutral. They are shaped by historical conditions, cultural ideologies, and lived experiences, and they often carry the legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. In recognizing this complexity, students can develop a critical, socially conscious approach to environmental images that is attentive not only to aesthetic questions but also to the urgent ecological and political realities of our time.

DELIVERY SUGGESTIONS

When teaching about art, gender and the environment, it always helps to ground these potentially daunting theoretical topics in relation to where students are at. One way to do this is to consider the social-media stream of eco-disaster imagery. For better or worse, at any given point one can count on images of environmental harm being circulated on digital platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. If you pluck one or two memorable images from these streams, you can start the lesson by asking people to describe what they see in a photograph of a hurricane, tornado or other extreme weather event, and how these images make them feel. How does any given image tell a bigger story about humanity’s existence with nature? Is this environmental story pessimistic, optimistic, or ambivalent?

From there, the lesson can take shape by noting the ways in which historical patterns inform images of eco-disaster, stressing that the nature-culture dualism is nearly always present unless an image maker consciously tries to undo this framework. Once the nature-culture divide concept is established, the thematic sections of the lesson can be treated in various ways, with differing levels of detail/emphasis.

AT THE END OF CLASS…

Since the lesson addresses a wide terrain of ideas and artworks, it is important to ground these conversations in artists’ lived experiences and in postwar movements for social justice. Remember, the goal is not a comprehensive or totalizing narrative of gender and eco-art. These thematic case studies are ways in which to capture ongoing intellectual debates and model the ways in which images of nature can alter our relationship to the material world around us.

As you bring this lesson into your own classroom, the emphasis can be on making these connections visible and relatable for students. Pause the lecture and use open-ended questions whenever possible, encouraging them to see how an artist’s choice of site, material, and process reflects both personal identity and broader ecological realities. Stage discussion starters by displaying a lone art slide accompanied with a statement by the artist (There is a list of artist interviews in the recommended readings). Most importantly, use the works as launching pads for conversations about how art can respond to environmental challenges in ways that are self-reflective, restorative, and imaginative.

Sample Activities / Discussion Starters / Projects

• Show Holt’s Sun Tunnels alongside Mendieta’s Silueta works and ask: How can scale and the absence/presence of the human figure change our engagement with the land?
• Have students work in small groups to match an artist with the key concept(s) they best exemplify, then have them explain their reasoning to the class.
• After discussing Frazier’s Flint is Family, reflect on the challenges of photographically depicting forms of “slow violence,” like lead contamination in Fint’s water.
• For a creative project, have students make an “eco see” photo essay that investigates the interrelationship of human beings in their environment, drawing on one of the visual paradigms discussed in the lesson: performative/nonrepresentational land art (Ana Mendieta); social reproduction (Mierle Laderman Ukeles); or decolonization (Wendy Red Star).