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The recently established field of settler colonial studies seeks to describe phenomena unique to settler colonialism as a mode of domination distinct from colonialism. Working to build a corollary branch of visual studies, this session seeks to describe histories of visual culture integral to establishing and resisting colonial settlements. Like colonialism, settler colonialism depends upon unequal relationships between subjects. Unlike colonialism, settlers seek to permanently replace indigenous peoples and never return “home.” This session contends that art and visual culture have been central to many aspects of settlement ideologies connected to land occupation and genocide, including erasing indigenous presence and histories, visualizing settler subjectivity, naturalizing social hierarchies, creating usable pasts, and fantasizing about the settler's special relationship to the land. Visuality is also critical to decolonial resistance movements and the cultivation of indigenous cultures in the face of near annihilation. Speakers investigate settler colonial and indigenous visual cultures of North America, South Africa, and Palestine, unsettling visual studies by countering the amnesia and invisibility characteristic of settler colonial art history.