Moderator:

William French, Ph.D., Loyola University Chicago

Keynote Address

Thomas Cole and the Popularization of Landscape Experience in the United States: 1825-1829

Kenneth John Myers, Ph.D., Detroit Institute of Arts

Although scholarly and popular writings about landscape art, literature and tourism usually assume that the ability to apprehend physical environments as landscapes is intuitive or natural, anthropological and historical evidence make clear that this is not so. In his talk, Dr. Myers will suggest that Thomas Cole’s early paintings and prints of the Catskill Mountains played a crucial role in the initial popularization of landscape appreciation in the United States. Cole’s work advertised the existence and accessibility of the Catskills; taught viewers mentally ‘to step back’ from a physical environment in order to objectify it as an aesthetic landscape; and inculcated a desire for landscape experience by suggesting that all well-bred people could, and should, have an interest in the aesthetic appreciation of physical environments.

Manifest Destiny

The Art Historian as Mr. Grayson: Landscape, Manifest Destiny and the Ecocritical Challenge

Alan C. Braddock, Ph.D., Temple University

Using William S. Jewett’s The Promised Land-The Grayson Family (1850) as a point of departure, Dr. Braddock will critically assess art history as a discipline still largely rooted in nineteenth-century epistemologies of style, biography and iconography. The persistence of landscape as a central category of interpretation illustrates the reification of such epistemologies. Despite various changes in art history’s methods and parameters over the years, the discipline also remains fundamentally anthropocentric and expansive—not unlike the ideology of Manifest Destiny—in its impulse to encompass an ever-increasing human-cultural terrain. Ecocriticism challenges art history’s anthropocentric expansionism by defamiliarizing categories such as landscape while interrogating assumptions about the human uses of cultural interpretation.

Environment to Landscape: Representations of Nature in American Art, 1760-1960

Peter John Brownlee, Ph.D., Terra Foundation for American Art

This talk will outline the environmental characteristics of artworks featured in the exhibition, including Edward Hicks, Arthur Wesley Dow and Arthur Dove among others. Examining the formal aspects as well as the historical context for particular works, this discussion will highlight the environmental values and sensitivities they evince.

Bounty

From Bounty to Beauty: Imagining a Land Ethic in Early America

John Gatta, Ph.D., Sewanee: University of the South

As Europeans advanced their settlement of North America, the presumption of enjoying access to limitless natural resources often led to careless exploitation of earth’s bounty. Nonetheless, even in this pre-ecological era, both visual and literary artists had begun to imagine a land ethic founded upon reverence for the earth as God’s Creation. So it is instructive to consider how, for example, the nascent environmental spirituality of William Bartram and John Woolman, two Quaker writers of the Revolutionary era, complements later visualizations of The Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks, another prominent Quaker. It is likewise worth noticing how, even during the new expansionist era of Manifest Destiny, heightened esteem for the beauty of old and circumscribed but comparatively wild preserves in the Northeast is reflected in writings such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem The Adirondacks as well as in landscape paintings by Thomas Doughty, Alfred Bricher and others.

Dr. Goluboff will explore a tradition of American writers about the outdoors as they register the variety and richness of the American landscape. Writers such as William Bartram, George Catlin, Thoreau and Emerson attach to nature’s bounty a variety of cultural meanings ranging from the political to the theological. He will also focus on how more recent writers, such as Barry Lopez and Sue Hubbell recapture a sense of bounty in the modern and diminished natural landscape.

Manifest Responsibility

Aesthethics: The Art of Ecological Responsibility

Michael S. Hogue, Ph.D., Meadville Lombard Theological School, University of Chicago

This talk will open with some theoretical and personal reflections on the influence of art and aesthetics on the moral imagination. With this in mind, select conceptual and practical challenges of ecological responsibility will be discussed. Arguments will be advanced for ways in which art and religious life can contribute to the formation and activation of ecological moral commitments.

Urbs in horto: The Communities of Chicago’s Parks

Adam Schwerner, Chicago Park District

Over the last 150 years Chicago citizens have shaped the history of the City’s parkland, in its appearance, use and function. Chicagoans dissolve all economic, cultural and social boundaries in the way they utilize the parks. As the City grows and the demands on parkland are intensified, it is imperative that the land is managed to address the diverse needs of the community the parks serve, in a way that is functional, sustainable and ecologically responsible.