Art, Nature, and the Anthropocene
How should humans relate to their environment? Are we a part of “nature”? These questions are urgent today, as we face the effects of climate change shaped by human actions. As Tamara Ketabgian’s students show in a new virtual exhibit, we are far from the first to ask them.
Curated by Ketabgian’s English and Environmental Studies class, “Green Romanticism” reveals how these topics also inspired Romantic artists and writers during the dawn of the Anthropocene, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
This virtual exhibit features Romantic-era engravings from the Wright Museum by Gustave Doré and various artists inspired by painter J. M. W. Turner and naturalist Gilbert White. Their works explore different perspectives on the human and the natural, whether in Doré’s supernatural book illustrations, White’s scientific natural history, or later engravings and reproductions of Turner’s landscape etchings.
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- Gustave Doré, “I watched the water-snakes,” engraving from Rime of the Ancient MarinerWright Museum of Art , Beloit College