ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ECO-ART
While much environmental art, including many works linked on this page, remains traditional or mainstream in focus, this site also provides links to a growing amount of environmental justice eco-art that 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.
Poster by Ricardo Levins Morales
Featured Site
Through Their Eyes: How artists are capturing the struggle for environmental justice. Post by Audrea Lin on a 2020 exhibit, "We Are the Storm," featuring images by Indigenous, Latinx and other artists focusing on ej art from grassroots ej movements.
Selected Articles About and Artists Who Make Environmental Art
- 18 Artists [working on] Climate Change Katherine Brooks piece in HuffPo on eco-art focused on climate issues and ideologies.
- 10 Artists Focused on Climate Change and Environmental Justice. Article from 2020 by Elena Morris.
- 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.
- 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.
- Art of Environmental Justice in an Expanded Field. Link to a streamed symposium featuring speakers addressing a broad range of approaches to ej art from around the globe.
- 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.
- Edward Burtynsky Consumate photographic chronicler of haunting beauty in the human and environmental devastation brought by mining, oil extraction and other industries.
- Environmental Justice: Art and Protecting Wildlife. Article by Alexander Schultz, linking human and animal justice in environmental art.
- This Exhibit Examines Nature and Environmental Justice in Three Centuries of American Art. Article by Patrick Rogers on a 2019 Princeton exhibit that provides ej eco-art a long historical trajectory in US.
- Land Art Generator Art intervening directly to improve environment.
- Solari Douglas Camp Nigerian environmental justice artist.
- John Dahlsen. Contemporary Australian environmental artist, working with recycled materials.
- Earth Art and Earthworks. Clear introduction to major artists working in these eco-active forms.
- Earthworks Art. Joshua Siegel piece on 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.
- Eco-Art Space. Links to over 900 environmental artists.
- Ecovention Catalog of art exhibit featuring 200 works of contemporary art with environmental intervention as a goal.
- Environmental Arts. Variety of art projects in various media from Envirolink. See especially, Art and Activism.
- Environmental Justice Art Commercial site with examples of ej art from around the globe.
- Gardening Superfund Sites Art project designs to clean up and restore superfund sites, the most e-waste heavy spots on the earth.
- Garth Lenz, "Tar Sands" Beautifully hideous photos of the destruction brought to Canadian First Nation lands by highly toxic tar sand extraction.
- Green Arts Web. Extensive site explaining and linking to examples of eco-art.
- Heidelberg Project Long-time Detroit neighborhood arts network that includes a focus on environmental justice work.
- Here’s How to Create Public Art Rooted in Environmental Justice. Article by Elizabeth Pandolfi on a major set of public art projects taking root across the US.
- Hudson River School: America, 1835 to 1870. Site for the first great school of American landscape painters, Romantics who set the tone for much early adoration of the sublime in Nature.
- Patricia Johanson. One of the pioneering eco-active artists, designing large-scale urban art sites that reclaim the land they inhabit, and educate about local environments.
- Chris Jordan Extraordinary photographic evocations of our toxic landscapes.
- Mapping the Terrain of Contemporary Eco-Art Article by Beth Carruthers offering a broad overview, but like most such works limited in its discussion of ej.
- Marion Martinez Latina artist who comments on the traditional spirituality and new media via art made from electronic detritus.
- Mural Arts Philadelphia: Environmental Justice. Examples from across the city.
- Native American Indian Children's Art Gallery. A contest for Native American students in Denver that include ej themes.
- 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.
- 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.
- Platform Long-standing, UK-based environmental justice and community art collective.
- Public Art and Ecological Process. Article by Elizabeth Umbanhowar surveying principles of public eco-art projects.
- Reclamation Art: Restoring and Commemorating Blighted Landscapes. Contains much information on the reclamation of landscapes by artists, including photographs of projects and a bibliography.
- 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.
- Street Art: Environmental Justice. Rich, thoughtful article with numerous examples of artists bringing ej art out into the world.
- Mierle Ukeles. New York's "garbage artist" whose Flow City project was among the first art works to raise issues about the psychology of urban waste and the ideologies of recycling.
- Through Their Eyes: How artists are capturing the struggle for environmental justice. Post by Audrea Lin on a 2020 exhibit, "We Are the Storm," featuring images by Indigenous, Latinx and other artists focusing on ej art from grassroots ej movements.
- 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 of landscape art.
- Women Environmental Artists Directory. Great resource on the many women working in eco-art today.
- World Community of Old Trees. An eco-art project that explores the tree image in art, created by June Julian.
- Fresh Kill Wonderfully bizarre early environmental justice film involving a lesbian couple who encounter a nuclear waste-filled barge passing their Staten Island home.