Climate Havoc: Art and Environmental Crisis Today

This undergraduate seminar examines contemporary art visual culture in relation to climate havoc. As climate-change threats and impacts grow more widespread, frequent and severe—wreaking environmental havoc worldwide—and in the absence of effective governance and international leadership in addressing adequate solutions, artists and activists are inventing and participating in creative strategies of consciousness-raising, mass mobilization, and ecologically sustainable modes of thinking and living. This seminar will examine recent practice and scholarship that addresses this nexus of art and environmental concern. We will focus on creative practices of climate justice, a term that signals the imperative of considering ecological transformation in relation to justice-oriented frameworks that both stress the socio-political and economic inequities of geographically differential environmental conditions and seek ways to rectify such inequalities by taking into account those intersections. Playing on the homonyms “havoc” and HAVC (History of Art and Visual Culture), this seminar maps out new trajectories of practice and methodologies of scholarship