Unsettled Places: Landscape and U.S. Imaginaries
Tues, Mar 4, 2025
3–4 pm
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest Baseline Y, 2022. Fifty cedar logs finished with tung oil, dimensions variable. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the artist in honor of Adam D. Weinberg 2024.336a-xx. ©️ Maya Lin Studio, courtesy Pace Gallery
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Online, via Zoom
This single-session course explores how landscape imagery has shaped American cultural mythology since the nation’s founding, revealing how the artists in Shifting Landscapes document and reinterpret the essential relationship between land, nation, and identity. Drawing connections to the eighteenth-century idea of the “picturesque”—where American landscapes are used to naturalize political power and ideals —we unpack how artists react to and interpret these foundational American myths of expansive, endless space.
Modern and contemporary artists have documented suburban expansion, urban density, and natural space, from Robert Adams’s photographs of the suburbanized West to Melvonna Ballenger’s films capturing 1970s Los Angeles to Martin Wong’s paintings of New York’s urban life. Meanwhile, artists like Laura Aguilar address the contested spaces and symbolic imagery of the US-Mexico borderlands as essential to American self-conception. Finally, we will look at the experimental earthworks of Maya Lin and Nancy Holt, which assert relationships between site, climate, and scale in the American landscape while evading institutional capture.
Through our discussion, the course uncovers how landscapes have long been used to shape beliefs about power, national identity, and nature—and how artists inherit visual traditions while reflecting evolving cultural understandings of American space.
Elizabeth Halide Akant is a Ph.D. Candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her research focuses on global modernist movements, nationalist art after empire, and the impact of social-political and artistic milieus on artworks. Her dissertation explores how folk art invocations in Turkish painting from the 1930s–50s mediated varying populist political movements. She has lectured at Brooklyn College since 2020 and previously served as an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Queens Museum.
