The intersection between climate change and art history opens new pathways for understanding how visual and material culture mediates human relationships to the natural world. Historical and contemporary depictions of nature illuminate how aesthetic practices register environmental knowledge and respond to ecological stress. Far from being a luxury of elite culture, art history is an essential tool for imagining alternative ecological futures.

Speakers

Andrew Patrizio, Professor of Scottish Visual Culture, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

Title: Looking for Love in Chaos Terrains

In this presentation, Prof Andrew Patrizio draws on a small set of contemporary art practices that speak to the theme of global climate change: Ilana Halperin’s Chaos Terrain (2023); Hanna Tuulikki’s Love (Warbler Remix) (2025) and Elizabeth Ogilvie’s Out of Ice (2014-). Halperin and Tuulikki are overseas artists who made Scotland their home many years ago. Scottish artist Ogilvie has ancestry from the island of St Kilda in the North Atlantic Ocean. This talk reflects on their phenomenal works in terms of climate, international movement and deep time. Halperin, Tuulikki and Ogilvie offer poetic, subtle, and sustained insights into climate change and art practice. Inspired by their visual enquiry, Patrizio draws out a set of positive reflections on the discipline of art history in a moment of climate crisis.

Andrew Patrizio is an art historian and curator specializing in art after 1945. His research and teaching lie at the intersection of Scottish art, environmental humanities, ecocritical methods and politics. His most recent book is The Ecological Eye: Assembling an Ecocritical Art History (2018, Manchester University Press) which explores the neglected territory between the care of the planet and the historical study of visual art. A follow-up edited collection Methods for Ecocritical Art History will be published in early 2026 (co-edited with Dr Olga Smith, Newcastle University, published by Manchester University Press). Patrizio has written for publishers ranging from Princeton University, Black Dog, de Gruyter, Routledge, Strange Attractor and Intellect and for journals such as New Formations, Antennae and Architecture and Culture. Patrizio is also part of the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network, a community of academics working on environment and climate issues.

He has curated numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally and works closely with art practice through collaboration, commissioning and writing. Patrizio has been a long-time collaborator with artist Ilana Halperin, and worked closely with artists such as Christine Borland, Alan Davie, Giuseppe Penone and Mona Hatoum. In 2016 he co-curated, with Bill Hare, the exhibition The Scottish Endarkenment. Art and Unreason from 1945 to the Present which was named as one of the top 10 UK exhibitions of the year by The Guardian. Patrizio’s ecological focused work led to him developing an art, culture and heritage policy collaboratively with members of the Scottish Green Party.

Alan C. Braddock, Ralph H. Wark Professor of Art History, Environmental Humanities and American Studies. William and Mary

Title: Art and the Climate of Industrial Meat

Art and activism around the issue of climate change have tended to emphasize petroleum as the primary—if not exclusive—driver of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions. Such petrocentrism obscures the substantial impacts of industrial meat production, including its large and growing carbon footprint, not to mention its calamitous problems of environmental injustice, pollution, dietary health, and animal abuse. This presentation examines an emerging body of creative work by artists who have begun to direct attention at the meat industry as an agent of climate violence using diverse media, historical references, and other aesthetic strategies.

Professor Braddock’s teaching and research explore the history of American and global art, ecology, environmental justice, and animal studies.  He is the author of the book Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (University of California Press, 2009) and Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History (Yale University Press, 2023), and the co-author/co-editor of three other books: A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, with Christoph Irmscher (University of Alabama Press, 2009), A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia’s Ecology in the Cultural Imagination, with Laura Turner Igoe (Penn State University Press, 2016), and Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, with Karl Kusserow (Princeton University Art Museum in association with Princeton University Press and Yale University Press, 2018).  Nature’s Nation accompanied a traveling exhibition co-curated by Braddock and Kusserow, winning three major awards: the Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for Distinguished Catalogue from the College Art Association, the Association of Art Museum Curators Award for Excellence, and the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for best art exhibition publication of the year. 

He will soon complete another new book titled Gun Vision: Ballistic Imagination in the First American Avant-Garde.  The Getty Research Institute has also invited him to co-edit a new global anthology on art history and ecology.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History and the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.

The colloquium was made possible through an endowment established by Alan Templeton (B.A., art history and psychology, ‘82).