PhD Candidate, Bert Geyer, “Creating the Forest: Aesthetic Contests in U.S. Imperial Forestry, 1862-1942”
Department of Art History Colloquium
September 27, 2024
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM America/Chicago
What if one considers managed forests as objects of design and aesthetic sensibility? Analyzing art and architectural mediations of forests alongside the more anthropogenic of forestry activities, afforestation and reforestation, this is the query of a dissertation investigating U.S. forestry and its antagonists in the Midwest, Philippines, and Panamá. The talk will limn the dissertation’s constitutive methods and constellation of objects and then elaborate one vignette: the dream of afforesting the Great Plains in the final decades of the nineteenth-century. By foregrounding the aesthetic, this research registers the sensory regimes that knot forest imaginaries with their fructifying techniques. As such, it apprehends comparison and conflict within U.S. forestry and with prior indigenous, colonial, and republican land management systems for their differential comportments to dwelling, cultivation, property, and commerce. Finally, it captures this moment’s shared modes of appreciation and rationales for conservation between art historiography and environmental rhetoric.
Bert Geyer is a PhD Candidate in the Art History Department at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is a collaborator in the Anthropocene Lab sponsored by UIC’s Institute for the Humanities and his research has recently been supported by UIC’s Award for Graduate Research and University Fellowship as well as the Forest History Society’s Alfred D. Bell Jr. Travel Grant.
Date posted
Sep 11, 2024
Date updated
Sep 11, 2024