How has the environment shaped artistic practice, and how can artistic form teach us to understand our local and planetary environment in new ways?

The artworks presented in Unsettled Ground speak to a generative conversation between art and the environment—whether understood as natural, human, or something altogether more complex—across multiple scales of time and space. Drawing on photography, prints, sculpture, and mixed media works from the Smart Museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition positions artists as astute observers of local, regional, and global ecologies, whose work offers new insight into our shared world. Themes of wonder, agency, dispossession, and resistance animate the objects on display, inviting us to reflect on the vital sustenance offered by the earth, as well as its fragility, and our responsibility to the planet and one another.

Organized by the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry, this exhibition was collaboratively curated by Katerina Korola (PhD ’21) and the undergraduate and graduate students of her seminar, “Picturing the Earth: Art and Environment in the Modern Era.” Over Fall 2021, the students worked together to research, conceptualize, and develop interpretive materials for the exhibition. Student essays and creative projects, hosted on the exhibition’s digital platform, will offer additional insight into select works on display.

Artists

Arthur Amiotte, Giovanni Castrucci (Attributed to), Mukul Dey, Mark Dion, Ruth Duckworth, Minnie Evans, Terry Evans, Walker Evans, Emile Gallé, Leonard Havens, Bertha Evelyn Jaques, Sheila Hicks, Yun-Fei Ji, Glasfabrik Johann Loetz Witwe, Eli Lotar, Richard Misrach, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Toshio Shibata, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, H. C. Westermann, and Joseph E. Yoakum.

About

This project was overseen by Katerina Korola (PhD ’21), Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, and Berit Ness, Associate Curator for Academic Engagement.