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Drawing has played a crucial role in the conception of the Americas as a territory. Due to the medium’s accessibility and ease of circulation, during colonization, artists and scientific explorers sketched landscapes that deceptively portrayed the land as uninhabited. They also used drawing to classify the plants and related specimens they encountered across the region, implementing the medium to categorize a world “new” to the Western eye. Later, as independent nations formed, the landscape genre and the scientific study of land were tools for countries to shape their identity in relation to the ground they occupied.

The legacy of drawing the outdoors in the Americas raises the question of how contemporary artists across the region use drawing to contend with topics of the land, territory, and environmental crisis. Through discussions of contemporary drawing (c. 1970 to present), this panel asks why and how artists in the Americas use the practice of drawing to engage with ecological topics. We welcome papers that address historical approaches to drawing today and expand the definition of drawing to three dimensions or performance. Art historians, curators, artists, and interdisciplinary thinkers are invited to explore ideas that include but are not limited to: artists who use the genre of landscape drawing, subvert it, or disregard it in favor of their own cosmovisions; art that evaluates and critiques the historical tradition of record keeping as a technique of conquest and environmental racism; and practices that incorporate materials of the earth into the medium of drawing.