The Material Cultures of Landscape

In the past thirty years, numerous art historians have demonstrated that the North American landscape painting tradition projects Euro-American economic, epistemological, and cultural ideals onto Indigenous land, justifying territorial expansion and fostering national identities. Resource extraction has also become a topic of study as scholars trace the lifecycles of objects like silver soup tureens, taking an interest in the labor and raw materials developed into finished products. This panel seeks to bring together these parallel tracks, inviting papers that consider representations of North American land and landscapes beyond the picture plane and within the broader realm of material culture studies. We hope to receive papers that examine how settler colonial land relations are constituted, contested, and/or complicated by this object category. In thinking through the settler colonial and ecological dimensions of design and material culture, some key questions may include: How do settler colonial land relations figure on a printed textile, ceramic plate, chair, or quilt? How does the dramatic vista manifest in the small, the daily, and the portable? How does the notion of landscape shift or sediment in objects made for intimate use within the home? While the historical landscape painting tradition is largely the purview of white men, we hope that considering landscape more broadly as a cultural resource will invite new objects, narratives, and questions pertaining to race and gender. By bringing two revisionist art histories into dialogue with one another, this panel will consider the intersectionality of land, power, home, labor, and looking.