Università Roma Tre

Communication: I am available s after every class and by appointment, by email and by phone.

This course is an introduction to artists, writers, and filmmakers who have employed their talents raising awareness about some of our most pressing environmental issues such as climate change, waste management, industrial pollution, deforestation, habitat loss, migration, food sustainability, etc. and these artists are finding imaginative and practical solutions to some of these problems. Drawing from a broad range of disciplines including art history, literature, and philosophy, as well as contemporary activism and public policy, this course will explore the way artists have embraced the radical idea that art can useful. While the focus will be on the work being done today by contemporary artists, the course will begin with nineteenth-century American landscape painters who were among the first to raise the alarm about what was being done to the wilderness. We will then look at the documentary photography of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the artists associated with the Sierra Club who were instrumental in the creation of America’s national parks and in the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, legislation that would guarantee the permanence of the nation’s wilderness preserves. We will also examine the way Earth and Land Art movements of the 1960s and 1970s moved out of the galleries and museums and into the land which, in many cases, led artists to realize their role as stewards of the natural environment.
Among the artists to be considered are Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, John Gast, Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, Dorothea Lange, Joseph Beuys, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Robert Morris, Nancy Holt, Hans Haacke, James Turrell, Betty Beaumont, Ana Mendieta, Mel Chin, Andy Golsworthy, Mierle Ukeles Laderman, Alan Sonfist, Maya Lin, Subhankar Banerjee, Pedro Reyes, Tania Bruguera, and Vik Muniz.
The course will be taught in English with Italian subtitles.

Recommended Text: Kastner & Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, Phaidon Press Limited, 1998. All other readings will be provided on pdfs Readings are not obligatory.