Michaela Rife

In response to the centrality of resource extraction in recent environmental art, my dissertation examines the historical visual culture of land use in the American West, from late nineteenth-century land rushes to the postwar energy boom, to tell a more complete story of the intertwining of land, resources, and settler culture in the region. My fellowship will focus on the central portion of my dissertation, an environmental history of New Deal post office murals in the Great Plains states. These paintings, many of which depict resource extraction and agricultural land use, are far less studied than the better-known Farm Security Administration photographs of the Dust Bowl, which offer an important point of comparison. What can we learn, for example, from considering the examples of healthy wheat harvests depicted alongside oil derricks in Kansas’s murals? My project, which takes its title from Louise Emerson Ronnebeck’s 1938 mural for Worland, Wyoming, will draw on collections at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of American History, as well as the National Archives, to contextualize these artworks in their contemporary visual and historical landscape. I argue that by examining these documents of government-sponsored public art—the installation of which produced a deep record of community response and artistic rationale—we can arrive at a better understanding of persistent, regional environmental conceptions and identities while also questioning who is served by these images and whose stories they elide. My work follows the ecocritical turn in art history by embracing environmental history and placing the two disciplines in conversation with one another. The visual culture of the New Deal and Great Depression era provides a particularly ripe avenue for this study, because it was a period of great environmental destruction and governmentsponsored artistic creation in the United States. My research looks to tell other sides of this story and to examine how Americans understood land use beyond exploitation. This work is particularly critical now, as it sheds light on the American experience of resources and environment in a specific period while also providing a background for many of our current debates over land use and climate justice.