The Art, Ecology, and Climate Project: Guides to Individual Artworks

All art is ecological. It is composed of materials that bear ecological histories. It refers to the planet we inhabit in ways that register environmental changes and that shape its audiences’ ecological awareness, thinking, and habits.

The Art, Ecology, and Climate Project brings such concerns to bear on Syracuse University’s art collection, at a time of intensifying and unsettling ecological and climatological change. Our research team has curated fifteen online galleries (e-museum packages) from the collection, each devoted to a different ecological topic, idea, or issue. Below you’ll find guides to a variety of artworks featured in the e-museums. You can also access both a general instructor’s guide and broader guides to each e-museum on this web page.

 

tortoiseshell enameled box in brown and orange patterned speckels, lid open that is lined with red velvet

Teaching Guide:
Tortoiseshell Tea Caddy

 Oil painting of a male with a red shirt on a brown horse holding a facoln in his left hand, in a field

Teaching Guide:
Hunting Images

 Collaborative hand-woven round, squat shaped basket bottom (b) and top (a), light green with thin bands of purple; the basket top has a central medallion shape consisting of bright light green-dyed moose hair and a pale bone-colored hand-carved moose antler sculpture of a robed figure that stands about 2" tall (carved by Stonehorse Goeman).

Teaching Guide:
Haudenosaunee Basket

 

Miniature golf court, with a number of sections throughout the photo, a grove of palm trees in the middle, with a ferris wheel and roller coaster in the background in the fog

Teaching Guide:
Golf Course Photographs

 black and white photograph of a landscape with a road in the middle, and an elephant crossing in the middle

Teaching Guide:
Photographs of Elephants

 black and white lithograph of a hilly farm landcsape

Teaching Guide:
Depression-era Farmscapes

 

Teaching Guide:
Chow Bag Series

Teaching Guide:
Alcoa Advertisements

 Black carved figure with a water jug on top of head, arm holding it steady.

Teaching Guide:
Hunger Figure