Understanding the complex relationships between human communities and the natural environments around us is both an old, foundational question of academic study as well as a timely, urgent issue brought to the fore by contemporary environmental crises with immediate implications for the way we live with each other in our shared spaces. Brought together by a shared interest in culture and the environment, the Environmental Arts & Humanities working group includes faculty working in diverse regions of the globe via different disciplines: anthropology, art, art history, design, landscape architecture and history. This long-term collaboration across these diverse areas leads to transdisciplinary and creative approaches to environmental humanities research, which have been supported by Here+Next as well as Arts & Sciences seed funding grants.
Environmental Arts & Humanities Working Group
Art Exhibit
Extractivism in the Americas
“Extractivism in the Americas” features artworks focused on mining, pipelines and other natural resource extraction. Through photography, film, textiles and design, these artists examine the environmental and social impacts of extraction in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. On view at the Des Lee Gallery, February 7–March 7, 2025.
Image: Sioux Energy Center coal power plant in the middle of the 2019 flood, Mississippi River by Derek Hoeferlin.
Extractivism in the Americas
“Extractivism in the Americas” features artworks focused on mining, pipelines and other natural resource extraction. Through photography, film, textiles and design, these artists examine the environmental and social impacts of extraction in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. On view at the Des Lee Gallery, February 7–March 7, 2025.
Image: BLR.4596 by Jennifer Colten.
Extractivism in the Americas
“Extractivism in the Americas” features artworks focused on mining, pipelines and other natural resource extraction. Through photography, film, textiles and design, these artists examine the environmental and social impacts of extraction in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. On view at the Des Lee Gallery, February 7–March 7, 2025.
Image: Yovana and her young daughter by Natalia Guzmán Solano
Birding the Museum
Mark Menjívar, a San Antonio-based artist and associate professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University, led members of the WashU and St. Louis communities on a guided “bird walk” through the Saint Louis Art Museum. Originally planned as a traditional outdoor bird-identifying excursion at the Audubon Center at Riverlands in West Alton, Missouri, inclement weather necessitated a location change — and a brand-new type of bird walk was invented. Taking participants through the museum’s galleries, Menjívar identifed birds represented in the artworks and discussed their migration and the interconnectedness of the Americas.
Photo: Brian Cochran
LECTURE
Desert Placemaking: The Role of Atmosphere in the Artwork of James Turrell and Rafa Esparza
Celina Osuna is a scholar and an artist. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, and her research, with an emphasis on Indigenous and Latinx Environmentalisms, explores aesthetics of desert places in literature, art and film and their impacts on cultural imagination and geopolitical relationships to land.
People
With the support of the Center for the Humanities, the working group brings together five leading environmental scholars across five disciplines and two schools, Arts & Sciences and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Researching and working in the environmental arts & humanities necessarily demands cross-disciplinary collaboration to understand the roots and impacts of environmental issues and raise awareness of solutions and approaches that can help address them. The working group seeks to respond to today’s environmental challenges not only by advancing environmental awareness but also by addressing environmental histories, arts and cultures through rigorous and interdisciplinary inquiry.
Bret Gustafson, Arts & Sciences
Derek Hoeferlin, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
Diana Montaño, Arts & Sciences
Patricia Olynyk, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
