International in scope, this volume (492 pages!) brings together 40 essays by leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown?
The contributors are from diverse backgrounds, including the Cherokee Nation, Lebanon, and South Africa.
Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change.

About the editors

T. J. Demos is Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History and Visual Culture, and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies, UC Santa Cruz.

Emily Eliza Scott is Assistant Professor of Art History and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon.

Subhankar Banerjee is Lannan Foundation Endowed Chair and Professor of Art & Ecology, and Director of the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities, University of New Mexico.

Paperback, published in 2023. 492 pages in total, 23 color and 84 black & white illustrations.

Table of Contents

Part I Extractivism

1 Extracting the Cost: Re-membering the Discarded in African Landscapes – Virginia MacKenny and Lesley Green

2 In the Frontiers of Amazonia: A Brief Political Archaeology of Global Climate Emergency – Paulo Tavares

3 From Tuíra to the Amazon Fires: The Imagery and Imaginary of Extractivism in Brazil – Rodrigo Guimarães Nunes and Alyne Costa

Describing the Indescribable: Art and the Climate Crisis – Lucy R. Lippard

5 Art of the Interregnum in Canada’s Chemical Valley – Jessica Mulvogue

6 Road to Injustice: Ecological Impunity and Resistance in West Papua – Nabil Ahmed and Esther Cann

Part II Climate Violence

7 Into the Heart of the Occupied Forest – Macarena Gómez-Barris

8 The Coming War and the Impossible Art: Zapatista Creativity in a Context of Environmental Destruction and Internal Warfare – Alessandro Zagato and Natalia Arcos

9 View from the Terracene – Sara Mameni

10 Waste You Can’t Deny: A Slow Trans-aesthetic in The Blue Barrel Grove – Sintia Issa

11 The Perpetual Present, Past, and Future: Slow Violence and Chinese Frameworks of In/Visibility and Time in Zhao Liang’s Behemoth – Connie Zheng

12 Remembering the Land: Art, Direct Action, and the Denial of Extractive Realities on Bougainville – Amber Hickey

13 Multispecies Cinema in Wretched Waters: The Slow Violence of the Rio Doce Disaster – Isabelle Carbonell

Part III Sensing Climates

14 Staying with the Troubling, Performing in the Impasse – Sarah Kanouse

15 A Conversation between Three Ecosexuals – Bo Zheng with Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle

16 Climate Justice, Satire, and Hothouse Earth – Julie Sze

17 Indigenous Media: Dialogic Resistance to Climate Disruption – Salma Monani, Renata Ryan Burchfield, Danika Medak-Saltzman, and William Lempert

18 At Memory’s Edge: Climate Trauma in the Arctic through Film – Lisa E. Bloom

19 The Breathing Land: On Questions of Climate Change and Settler Colonialism – Heather Davis

Part IV In/Visibilities

20 Sensing Particulate Matter and Practicing Environmental Justice – Jennifer Gabrys

21 Visualizing Atmospheric Politics – Amy Balkin

22 Atmospheres and the Anthropogenic Image-Bind – Caroline A. Jones

23 Ways of Saying: Rhetorical Strategies of Environmentalist Imaging – Suzaan Boettger

24 Sublime Aesthetics in the Era of Climate Crisis? A Critique – Birgit Schneider

25 Inside Out: Creative Response Beyond Periphery and Peril – Julie Decker

26 Capturing Nature: Eco-Justice in African Art – Nomusa Makhubu

Part V Multispecies Justice

27 Doing Difference Differently As Wetlands Disappear: (A California Story) – Elaine Gan

28 “With Applied Creativity, We Can Heal”: Permaculture and Indigenous Futurism at Santa Clara Pueblo – Rose B. Simpson in Conversation with Jessica L. Horton

29 Decolonizing the Seed Commons: Biocapitalism, Agroecology, and Visual Culture – Ashley Dawson

30 The Politics and Ecology of Invasive Species: A Changing Climate for Pioneering Plants – Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes

31 Multispecies Futures through Art – Ron Broglio

32 Activist Abstraction: Anita Krajnc, Save Movement Photography, and the Climate of Industrial Meat – Alan C. Braddock

33 Alien Waters – Ravi Agarwal

34 Everything is Alive: Jason deCaires Taylor’s Vicissitudes – Inez Blanca van der Scheer

Part VI Ruptures/Insurgencies/Worldings

35 The Work of Life in the Age of Extinction: Notes Towards an Art of Aliveness – John Jordan

36 The Political Ecology and Visual Culture of the Pacific Climate Warriors 399 – Carol Farbotko and Taukiei Kitara

37 From Institutional to Interstitial Critique: The Resistant Force that is Liberating the Neoliberal Museum from Below – Emma Mahony

38 Beneath the Museum, the Spectre – Steve Lyons and Jason Jones for Not An Alternative

39 Our House Is on Fire: Children, Youth, and the Visual Politics of Climate Change – Finis Dunaway

40 From The Red Nation to The Red Deal – A Conversation with Melanie K. Yazzie and Nick Estes