{"id":29021,"date":"2026-07-28T11:13:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T15:13:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/?post_type=story&p=29021"},"modified":"2026-07-28T11:13:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T15:13:33","slug":"new-class-to-examine-how-art-captures-climate-change-over-centuries","status":"publish","type":"story","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/2026\/07\/28\/new-class-to-examine-how-art-captures-climate-change-over-centuries\/","title":{"rendered":"New class to examine how art captures climate change over centuries"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Students will probe themes of power and access in landscape paintings<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Two years ago, while teaching courses that examined many 19th-century works, Art History<\/a> Professor Kristina Wilson<\/a> noticed that her students were drawn to landscape paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey’re very intrigued by it as an avenue to explore critical issues in colonization and who has access to what spaces, how the landscape gets marketed,\u201d says Wilson. \u201cLandscape painting isn’t just boring and beautiful. It actually is wrapped up in very interesting questions of power and access and climate history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Professor Kristina Wilson visited two climate-related exhibitions at the Worcester Art Museum during spring 2026, “Fever Dreams of a Cool-Breathed Earth” and “A Weather Eye: Art and Early Modern Meteorology.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It gave Wilson an idea to create a new course. Art, Landscape, and the Environment will be offered for the first time in spring 2027 and designed around 19th- and 20th-century and contemporary art. The course is expected to draw interest from students studying in the Visual and Performing Arts<\/a>, the School of Climate, Environment, and Society<\/a>, and those with a concentration in environmental humanities<\/a>. The class will likely take field trips to view relevant pieces in local collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI’ve always loved landscape painting, and there’s scholarship that engages with different aspects of environmental history and climate history,\u201d says Wilson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An example is how impressionist Claude Monet depicts pollution and shifting qualities of light in paintings created in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The Worcester Art Museum has a Monet depicting the Waterloo Bridge in London that could illustrate this discussion for the class, Wilson says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The course is expected to examine photography like that of Carleton Watkins, a 19th-century artist best-known for shooting western landscapes, especially Yosemite Valley. Watkins was among photographers of that time who captured images of mining in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey’re creating a mythology about this untouched land \u2014 when of course people had been living on it for thousands of years \u2014 that kind of justifies Manifest Destiny and western expansion of the United States,\u201d says Wilson. \u201cBut then those images become the tool for protecting the land when we get to Theodore Roosevelt and the establishment of the National Park Service.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n