ACADEC 2025 Art RG Section II

Section II Summary

  • Prior to the modern and contemporary period, land had been used in art primarily as a subject to represent in landscape paintings, which often were used for political purposes.

  • Contemporary artists have adapted the tradition of landscape painting to engage current issues of politics, climate, and environmentalism.

  • There are many terms in circulation that describe the people who lived in present day North America prior to European colonization, each with its own particularly history and connotations.

Allora & Calzadilla, Land Mark (Foot Prints), 2002

  • Allora and Calzadilla began collaborating as artists after meeting one another while studying abroad in Florence.

  • Land Mark (Foot Prints) is part of an extended series of artworks that Allora and Calzadilla have created about the land use on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico.

  • Land Mark (Foot Prints) was part of a civil disobedience protest, which involved occupying a bombing range on Vieques and leaving messages in the sand from custom made shoes.

  • The photographs of Land Mark (Foot Prints) translate Allora and Calzadilla’s action into visual artwork that can be displayed in museums. The works play with the terminology of a prominent “landmark,” in that imprints in the sand were fleeting, but the photographs are more lasting.

  • Allora and Calzadilla’s work ultimately invites consideration of ethics in land use and reclamation.

Kent Monkman, The Fourth World, 2012

  • Cree artist whose paintings, films, videos, performances, installation address colonization and indigenous culture

  • The Fourth World appropriates artwork of other artists and blurs the time periods of cultural encounters

  • The waterfall depicted is based on 19th-century painting by Albert Bierstadt, whose pictures of the American west were used to further Manifest Destiny

  • Depiction of blonde men culturally appropriating indigenous hunting practices ties to histories of stereotyping, exclusion of natives (Miwok not depicted in Bierstadt’s original painting)

  • Copper-colored walls depicted are a copy of Clara-Clara by Richard Serra

Bonnie Devine, Battle for the Woodlands, 2014-15

  • Contemporary installation artist, curator, writer, educator, member of the Serpent River First Nation of Northern Ontario (Anishinaabe/Ojibwa)

  • Early projects such as Reclamation Project draw attention to / resist colonial land occupation

  • Others, such as Stories from the Shield, incorporate cultural practices such as weaving and canoe building to address environmental, political difficulties endured by Serpent River First Nation

  • Battle for the Woodlands is multimedia; addresses land and environmental harm in the Eastern Woodlands of North America in the 19th century

    • Conflicting approaches to representing animals, water, land, and people in Battle for the Woodlands. Inspired by a colonial map; shows divisions in contrast to Devine’s own painting and sculpture, which is based on co-existence and connection

Will Wilson, Church Rock Spill Evaporation Ponds, 2019

  • Contemporary Diné (Navajo) artist, spent the formative years of his life on Dinétah (Navajo Nation)

  • Church Rock Spill Evaporation Ponds part of a photographic series Wilson calls “Survey” that documents contaminated land within Dinétah and its borders

  • Church Rock Spill Evaporation Ponds is an aerial view of two ponds used to evaporate water contaminated with tailings from uranium mining at the site of the largest radioactive spill in US history

  • Selected sites for “Survey” address the history of environmental pollution on lands in the American West that were home to native peoples but were treated by the US government as empty lands for mineral extraction and toxic storage

  • Wilson’s art is dedicated to humanizing groups of people who have historically been stereotyped, while also bringing awareness to environmental problems that have been historically suppressed.