A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History

Abstract

The introduction and twelve essays in this strong volume consider intriguing instances of American art that span more than four centuries, including the work by John White and Theodor de Bry of the Roanoke voyage; botanist William Bartram; Louis Agassiz and his illustrator Antoine Sonrel; painters Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Thomas Moran, and Thomas Eakins; photographers Carleton Watkins, Eliot Porter, and Subhankar Banerjee; Harlem Renaissance muralist Aaron Douglas; Dust Bowl painter Alexandre Hogue; futurist Buckminster Fuller; and Navajo weaver Alberta Thomas. Written by specialists in art history, literature, history, and architecture, each essay combines close formal analysis of images with rich historical contextualizing, a variety of theoretical and interpretive tools, and an attention to the ways artistic representations intervene in their surrounding cultural and political worlds. They consider the spaces in which science and art overlap; the moral and ethical weight of art objects; the materiality of these objects and the literal ways they are handled and looked at; and subtopics that range from pet dogs to uranium tailings, cartographic conventions to racial ecology. Many of them consider written texts, too, and representations that combine words with images in various ways: paired verbal and visual representations of medusa jellyfish, for instance, which join in confronting “a perceptual as well as an epistemological challenge” (67), Banerjee's captions for his photos of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which enhance the vision they suggest of global interconnectedness. And, not least, this collection is lucid and jargon-free. Every essay here is both interesting and a pleasure to read.