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In Silent Spring (1962), Rachel Carson wrote of the “grim specter” of ecological threats “flowing unseen through the earth.” More recently, Rob Nixon (2011) has argued that to confront the slow violence of environmental injustice, we must learn to “give figurative shape to formless threats.” For almost two decades, ecocritical art history has explored various environmental contexts but has tended to emphasize representation. This session proposes a different approach by asking these questions: Can art history—an academic discipline rooted in vision’s critical application—contend with environmental issues that go unseen? In particular, how does ecocritical art history engage the ways materials embody cultural relationships to the environment? Cannupa Hanska Luger’s well-known Mirror Shield project deployed representation through corporeal reflection of police sent to suppress #NoDAPL demonstrations, but its simple materials (mylar, Masonite, rope) also embodied invisible bonds of cultural solidarity and environmental concern about unseen threats posed by petrocolonialism. Historical practices of painting on ivory, vellum, and stone hid the violent extractive origins of these mediating surfaces, while materializing aspirations to spiritual purity and transcendence. This panel invites art historians and other scholars of visual and material culture to explore such issues. Suggested topics include analyses that resuscitate the vitality of materials rendered invisible by artistic processes, studies that probe hidden environmental dimensions of works created in any context or medium, and inquiries that bring to light political ecologies obscured by aesthetic perception or commodity consumption.