Bert Geyer
PhD Candidate: Art, Architecture, and Environment in U.S. Empire
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About
My dissertation research analyzes the aesthetic dimensions of U.S. imperial forestry in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. It foregrounds sites of afforestation and reforestation in the Midwest, Caribbean, and Philippines. There are at least three aspects of forestry and forests that merit aesthetic scrutiny. First, any management of a forest as a space or resource entails distinct objectives and technics. Alongside the understanding of these provided by the natural and social sciences, the aesthetic, with its methodological attention to the overlay of sense and thought, is a category of analysis attuned to the sensory regimes that knot forest imaginaries with their fructifying techniques. This application of the aesthetic also makes it a site of comparison and conflict between U.S. forestry and prior indigenous and Spanish colonial land management systems for their differential orientations to dwelling, cultivation, property, and commerce, and the sensoria through which such things are registered and enacted. Second, is, in Alois Riegl’s phrasing, the “modern historical perception” that in this moment increasingly extended the same modes of appreciation and rationales for preservation to both art historical and natural “monuments.” Third, are the ways in which artist, architects, and landscape architects mediated the forests of U.S. empire both on site and remotely. While composing this research into a history, I am persistently reflexive concerning historiographic form, how it co-produces the past it formalizes and sets the conditions of engagement and apprehension between an audience and a past—a conviction developed during my training and practice as an artist.
I currently serve as a co-leader of the Anthropocene Lab Working Group sponsored by UIC’s Institute for the Humanities. My 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. I find the teaching of both seminars and studios to be enriching and consequential. I have taught architectural history seminars at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, sculpture studios at Chicago State University, served as a teaching assistant to various art and design history surveys at UIC, and worked closely with art and design students as a shop manager offering individuated fabrication instruction and consultation. In 2023-2024 I served my department and graduate student colleagues as the president of the Art History Graduate Student Association.
Education
2016 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
2013 BA, Rhodes College