Cultivating Art Inquiry Through Land-Based Thinking on Social Justice Art and Museum Praxis

Abstract

Place has long been noticed, made, developed, and narrativized in favor of settler majorities’ economies and hegemonies. Disregarding Indigenous presence and land, the terror on the land continues in the form of dislocation and dispossession of Indigenous, Black, and other minoritized communities of color, along with racial segregation and alienation. Drawing on the scholarship of land-based and decolonizing education, this article provides the conceptual groundwork for a form of art education theory and practice concerned with place-based social justice and equity. Particularly, I propose land-based art inquiry as a decolonizing pedagogy that helps critically assess settler colonial ways of sharing and making place via spatial–temporal injustice and the normalization of settler colonial logics that pervade our daily lives. The art inquiry generates new and critical ways to engage with the land as a site of art and museum (educational) practice as exemplified in the three different sites—a graduate students’ collaborative art-based project, a contemporary artist’s praxis, and museum praxis. Graduate students’ site-specific installation and contemporary artist JeeYeun Lee’s mobile walking are artistic interventions to public places that critique settler narratives and re-story the place. They highlight the ways in which land-based art inquiry can help individuals (re)connect with and (un)learn the stories and politics of their relationships to the land, thus troubling the settler colonial territorial imperatives. Also, by bringing land-based art inquiry into the investigation of the museum as another settler colonial place seeks and brings understanding of contemporary Indigenous-led collaborative museum spatial design and (educational) praxis for decolonizing possibilities.