From Representation to Relationship: Place Based Learning in Art and Design Education

As both a contemporary landscape artist and professor, I invite students to understand artmaking from nature not only through distant vistas or iconic sites, but through the immediacy of their everyday surroundings. A city street corner shaded by an old live oak, a patch of moss on a sidewalk, or the shifting light across a dorm room window can all become entry points for perceiving the environment as a living system. These seemingly ordinary places offer profound lessons in interconnection, resilience, and change—if we learn how to look. In my teaching, students engage with local sites both within and beyond the studio, cultivating attention to overlooked details that reveal ecological and cultural histories embedded in their daily lives. Scientific insights into plant behavior, atmospheric conditions, and urban ecologies are paired with land-based perspectives that are brimming with creative possibility. This integration helps students reframe their everyday observations as opportunities to encounter intelligence, reciprocity, and meaning in place. This presentation will highlight artwork, sketchbook practices, plein-air sessions in both natural and built environments, and critique strategies that ask students to consider not just what they see, but how their creative choices participate in broader systems. By expanding landscape study into the familiar, students learn to experience the world around them as dynamic and interconnected. In doing so, they move beyond representation to relationship, fostering practices of attention that connect artmaking to ecological awareness and everyday stewardship.