Class name: Art, Ecology, Activism: Aesthetics & Resistance in the Climate Crisis
Taught by: Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Dylan Gauthier
Says Gauthier about his class:
In the face of the escalating climate crisis, contemporary visual, sound, and performance artists are at the forefront of cultural and political resistance, resilience, and adaptation. This course delves into the intersection of art, ecology, and activism, exploring how artistic practices can challenge and reshape prevailing narratives of capitalism, colonialism, corporatism, and extractive industries.
The course is designed to foster an interdisciplinary understanding of how artists contribute to environmental—and other intersectional forms of—activism and to equip students with the tools to develop their own creative responses to ecological and social challenges.
Gauthier on why he wanted to teach this class:
The initial idea for the class came from an exhibition that I co-curated with Kendra Sullivan in 2017, Resistance After Nature, which focused on artists resisting the climate crisis through visual, sonic, performative, collaborative, participatory, and research-based methodologies. The exhibition was presented by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities in Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery.
I was looking back at the exhibition, and I realized how many of the topics and voices we included in that exhibition were making radically experimental work that was still pushing society forward. The exhibition included a very diverse range of artists working across media, from Ursula Biemann’s Forest Law on the protection of the Ecuadoran Amazon to works by Mary Mattingly, Newton and Helen Harrison, Postcommodity, and Anne Lydiat and Chris Wainwright that signaled another world that could yet be possible.
It felt like an apt moment to return to this work—which, at the baseline, is very hopeful work—given the parallels between 2017 and 2025. I felt the class would allow me to dig into the work by these artists and others who are staking new ground and expanding the sense of what was possible for us in relation to the current political moment and a sense of losing ground to climate change.
Gauthier on what makes this class unique:
The class bridges art history, environmental studies, and the humanities with forms of protest and resistance while also digging into the aesthetics of social activism, speculative Indigenous and afro-futurism, LGBTQIA+ and AIDS activism, and historical precedents in environmental art. Through a range of guest speakers and case studies researched and presented by students, the class develops a theory of effective activism that calls on an array of disciplines and practices to connect with a broad public.