Nature's Nation

"Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment offers a compelling new vision of American art, examining for the first time how artists have both reflected and shaped environmental understanding while contributing to the development of modern ecological thought. Reframing more than three centuries of diverse artistic practice in North America, this timely volume traces evolving ideas about the environment - and our place in it - from colonial encounters between Indigenous beliefs and European natural theology through nineteenth-century notions of progress and Manifest Destiny to the emergence of contemporary ecological ethics. Far-reaching and multidisciplinary in its interpretive approach, Nature's Nation looks at works of art across genres and media - including painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, photography, decorative arts, and video - revealing important new discoveries about creative encounters with environmental history and politics through materials, techniques, subjects, and ideas, With essays and commentary by both scholars and artists, the book offers the first broad ecocritical review of American art and features work by more than one hundred artists, from Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Cole, and Winslow Homer to Georgia O'Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith"--Book jacket flap.