Environmental Justice Eco-Art

While much environmental art, including many works linked on this page, remains traditional or mainstream in focus, we hope to use this site increasingly to provide links to environmental justice eco-art which takes on issues of race, class, gender and eco-colonialism in the unequal distribution of environmental problems and benefits within the US and around the globe. This includes examples of eco-activist art, art that actually changes the environment for the better, rather than just "representing" it. Suggestions of further examples of such art are welcome.

Featured Site

• Art and Ecology. This online museum features environmental artists, encourages and facilitates eco-art, and acts as "a giant collaborative art making tool."

General Sites

• Eco-Arts Space. Good links to many important environmental artists.
• Environmental Arts. Variety of art projects in various media from Envirolink. See especially, "Art and Activism."
• Green Arts Web. Extensive site explaining and linking to examples of eco-art.
• Recycled, Re-seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap. Exhibit of "recycled art" commenting on race/ethnicity, global capitalism and environmental degradation, from the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, NM.
• Community Arts Network. Articles, links, reviews of community-based art, including eco-art.
• Environmental Racism and Children's Art. From East Palo Alto's Greenaction Youth site.
• Native American Indian Children's Art Gallery. A contest for Native American students in Denver.
• Yesworld: Art Action. Workshop camp for social and environmental justice art activism.
• Parks and People. A Baltimore-based community organization involved in urban greening projects and environmental community art. A model example of a growing phenomenon of urban eco-restoration.
• Women Environmental Artists Directory. Great resource on the many women working in eco-art today.

More Specialized Sites

• The Hudson River School: America, 1835 to 1870. Sites for the first great school of American landscape painters.
• Artists of the American West. The landscape of the American West has been a key site for constructing heroic, masculine, and nationalist ideologies through the natural environment.
• "FreshKill." This independent film (1994), directed by Shu Lea Cheang, written by Jessica Hegodorn, is full of wild gender b(l)ending, racial cross-dressing and rich environmental justice thematics. The film is a brilliant, funny, serious exercise in "ecocybernoia," involving a global plot to exchange industrial waste via sushi made from the glowing red lips of radioactive fish!
• American West Paintings by Thomas Moran. Information on images from this 19th century landscape artist.
• Women Artists of the American West. Examine the similarities and differences between these often lesser-known women artists and those working in the heroic masculine tradition (like Thomas Moran, above).
• Ansel Adams. Adams' nature photographs, known most widely through Sierra Club calendars, continue a heroic, masculine image of nature begun in the sublime nature paintings of the early 19th century.
• Patricia Johanson.One of the great eco-active artists, designing large-scale urban art/sites that reclaim the land they inhabit and about which they educate.
• Mierle Ukeles.New York's terrific "garbage" artist whose "Flow City" project raises issues about the psychology of urban waste and the ideologies of recycling.
• A World Community of Old Trees. An eco-art project that explores the tree image in art, created by June Julian.
• Last Tree Gallery. Computer generated landscapes.
• 7000 Oaks by Joseph Beuys. A New York urban forest renewal project by one of the most important postmodern artists to engage the nature/culture dichotomy.
• John Dahlsen. Contemporary Australian environmental artist, working with recycled materials.
• Hexagon-Subdivision Rivers. Explore a series of computer generated landscapes by Ken Musgraves; "socially constructed and virtual."
• Panoramas:the Landscape Arts of North America. Comparative exhibit tracing the history of landscape arts in Canada, Mexico,and the US, from the Virtual Museum of Canada.
• Public Art and Ecological Process. Article by Elizabeth Umbanhowar surveying principles of public eco-art projects.
• Earthworks Art. Article by Joshua Siegel. Earthworks, a controversial form of art arising in the 1960s, use the earth as a canvas in ways that stress the indivisibility of nature-culture, but sometimes also put further stress the environment in the process.
• Earth Art and Earthworks. Clear introduction to major artists working in these eco-active forms.