Defining Sustainability: From the ASU Art Museum Collection

Students from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the School of Sustainability will work with Dr. Claudia Mesch, art history, and Julie Anand, photography, from the School of Art, to explore art and sustainability issues raised by artworks in the ASU Art Museum's permanent collection. The exhibition will include both past and present examples of artists exploring human interaction with the land, urbanization, natural and manmade materials, pollution, cultural sustainability and sustainable processes, and will explore how artists have brought issues of sustainability to a broader community, encouraged participation and dialog, and proposed creative solutions.

The exhibition, curated by Mesch and Heather Lineberry, Senior Curator and Interim Director of the ASU Art Museum, will include historic precedents, like the 19th century Hudson River school painters who painted classic American landscapes with encroaching signs of industrialization, as well as selections of work by contemporary artists like Matthew Moore, who has created compelling land art works on his family's farm in the middle of the suburbs in West Phoenix, and Eddie Dominguez, who uses ceramics to explore human history and impact on the earth.

The students in the seminar will bring their different disciplines to their discussions and research. As the conversation deepens, the projects that emerge from the class will be accessible to the public in the gallery on a class bulletin board and on the website including a class blog. Class sessions with guest speakers from the fields of art, science and the humanities will be open to the public. The students in the seminar will also interact with the artists in residence during the larger fall season.

Visit the About section of our Web site or our blog for project details.