Tyler Shine

The assumption that Black communities are uninterested in the natural environment and environmentalism is a subtle but pervasive idea in popular media, contemporary culture, and even some spaces in academia. A similarly false assumption operates within art history, in which Black artists are frequently pigeonholed and believed to be only concerned with racial identity. Sadly, the histories of environmentalism and modernism in the United States have long reflected these narrow points of view. In contrast, my dissertation is guided by the question, “How have Black artists in the second half of the twentieth century engaged with the natural environment?” I bring together art history and other disciplines comprising the environmental humanities within an ecocritical, Black diasporic framework to explore the intersections of modernism and ecology through the work of Jacob Lawrence, Alma Thomas, Martin Puryear, and Ellen Gallagher. By analyzing the ways in which these four artists of the Black diaspora have engaged with the natural environment, my project unsettles modernist ideas of “nature” and retrieves its layered and shifting meanings.

In this project, I utilize a wide variety of material evidence, including literature, film, design, popular culture, cookbooks, and music, as generative sources for interpreting these artists’ work through an ecocritical lens. These cultural sources provide alternative and nonhierarchical ways to examine ecological relationships outside the exclusionary spaces that have typically defined modernism and environmentalism. I consider what the visual arts can uniquely do that is distinct from but resonates with social, scientific, and political actions on ecological issues. In doing so, this project reimagines how we can recognize the often-silenced contributions of Black American artists to the environmental humanities in our present moment.