The 24th Janet E. Hutchison Lecture with Aaron Katzeman

The contentious category of “land” has understandably been central to both commemorations and critiques of the Land Art movement. While some extol the aesthetic novelty of the movement’s site-specific advancements in the 1960s and 1970s, others emphasize the uncomfortable similarities between such practices and the foundational motivations of settler colonialism, each driven toward supposedly empty tracts awaiting one to stake their claim. Often discounted in these land-centric analyses, though, is the question of labour. How has labour, like that employed in the construction of Land Art, historically been complicit in settler colonial dispossession? And what might a renewed focus on labour’s revolutionary potential offer in an era of ever-intensifying climate injustice caused by colonial racial capitalism?

Inspired by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto’s exhibition Earthwork, and derived from the speaker’s forthcoming book project, this talk will focus on the confluence of land and labour to productively reevaluate the Land Art movement in a manner that also invigorates anticolonial movements for land back, highlighting artists’ liberatory role as not merely workers on the land but, rather, of and for the land.

Following the lecture, please join us for a reception in the Earthwork exhibition at the University of Toronto Art Centre.

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About the Scholar

Aaron Katzeman is Assistant Professor of History of Art at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on visual culture concerning the interdependent legacies of U.S. settler colonialism and imperialism, specializing in the intersection of nationalism, class, and environmental politics. His current book project comparatively analyzes art and film produced alongside land-based Indigenous, peasant, and anticolonial national liberation struggles since the 1960s. Katzeman’s writing has appeared in Radical History Review, Third Text, and Pacific Arts, among others. His work has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, University of California Humanities Research Institute, and Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.

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Image by Chad Breece

Info: Hart House Music Room (2nd Floor)

Info: Reception at the University of Toronto Art Centre

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