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The term “New Topographics” describes a stark style of landscape photography that debuted in the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Rather than presenting idealized or transcendent depictions of nature, the artists in the show focused on the mundane and the banal, documenting the effects of industrialization and suburbanization on the American terrain. Robert Adams’s photographic series, for example, recorded the residential spread along the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in a straight-on and detached style. More recent images of the North American landscape by artists such as Christina Fernandez and An-My Lê carry on this aesthetic tradition but with more pointedly political undertones. Centering the impact of the human-made encroachments of colonization, war, and pollution, these works invoke the lived consequences of such intrusions on both the body and the land, serving as ethical acts of resistance through documentation.

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Nicole Soto Rodríguez
Acto #1 Hotel Normandie, 2015

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Nicole Soto Rodríguez
Acto #1 Hotel Normandie, 2015

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Nicole Soto Rodríguez
Acto #1 Hotel Normandie, 2015

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Acto #2 Templo Del Maestro, 2015

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Acto #3 Southwestern High School, 2015

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Acto #4 Continental Motors, 2015

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Landscape of the Body (Epilepsy Test), 2011

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Rather than accepting the border between the US and Mexico as a fixed and immutable geopolitical line, artists working in the region propose that this part of the American landscape is an herida abierta or open wound—as the Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa described it in her 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera— where loss and regeneration coexist. Enrique Chagoya, for example, employs a satirical approach in his codices, made in the tradition of ancient Mesoamerican manuscripts, that tell the history of Western civilization from the perspective of the colonized, while Leslie Martinez draws inspiration from the rugged geography of their native south Texas by sewing rags and other recycled materials to their canvases to evoke a landscape marked by pain but also healing. The works gathered here consider political, cultural, and spiritual borderlands as manifestations of a landscape straddling two realities at once, revealing the creative forces that can grow from the grief of historical trauma, erasure, and omission.

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Requiem for my border crossing and my undocumented father's #6, 2016-2018

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The History of the Luiseño People, 1993

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Fire (America) 3, 2016

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Yo Soy Un Puente Tendido / This Is My Home, 2019

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Three Eagles Flying, 1990

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Patrick Martinez Migration Is Natural, 2019, fabricated 2021

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Patrick Martinez Migration Is Natural, 2019, fabricated 2021

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From the unruly energy of a single city block to the grandeur of its towering skyline, New York has long inspired artists. The works gathered here, ranging in date from the early 1970s to 2020, document the many ways the city has changed—whether gradually or abruptly—in the aftermath of significant economic, political, and catastrophic events. The early 1970s saw New York in a state of economic decay and social turmoil, yet artistic experimentation flourished, driving new developments in feminist art, neo-expressionism, and street photography. By the 1980s and early 1990s New York had come to be known as a global city; nonetheless many artists living here remained decidedly local in their focus, depicting their neighbors or the theater of daily life. In the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, unsettling images of the tragedy and an overwhelming sense of alienation impacted the way some artists portrayed the city. Two decades later, works made during the COVID-19 pandemic similarly bear signs of the loneliness, disruption, and uncertainty experienced by so many. Through all these profound shifts, the city has remained an important collaborator for artists seeking to understand how the built environment can embody the complexities of urban existence and offer new ways of seeing and understanding one’s place in it.

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2 Lizards, 2020

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Earth art and ecofeminism—artistic and philosophical movements of the 1960s and 1970s—proposed new frameworks for how we view and experience our shared planet. While Earth art marked a conceptual turn toward engaging directly with the forms of nature and the land, ecofeminism put forward ideas about appreciating and protecting the environment within anticolonial and feminist perspectives. The works in this gallery represent the roots and legacies of these movements, exploring the interconnectivity of the natural world and humanity’s place within it. Here artists celebrate nature’s vastness and ephemerality in works that stand as artistic counterpoints to human-centered thinking. Some, including Carlos Villa, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Michelle Stuart, deal directly with natural forms and use organic materials or else the landscape itself in diverse ways. Others, such as Nancy Holt, offer more embodied ways of experiencing the world, while still others, including Carolina Caycedo and Maya Lin, draw attention to regionally specific environmental concerns.

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My Roots, 1970-1971

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Los Angeles in Film and Video                                        6

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Los Angeles in Film and Video                                        6

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Los Angeles has been a major center of the movie industry since the first decades of the twentieth century. Artists marginalized from mainstream cinema production or otherwise engaged in experimental practices have also found community and inspiration there. In the late 1960s, a critical gathering of African and African American students formed at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. Loosely grouped together under the moniker L.A. Rebellion, these filmmakers—including Melvonna Ballenger, whose 1978 narrative short Rain (Nyesha) is screening here—centered Black stories and experiences in their moving-image works. Made five years later, Ulysses Jenkins’s Without Your Interpretation (1983) documents a performance staged along the Los Angeles River that used movement to critique American obliviousness to global societal ills. In these works, Ballenger and Jenkins aim to depict complex representations of Black life in counterpoint to the film industry’s ongoing, detrimental stereotypes.

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These works propose an alternative geography where humans, animals, and nature inhabit one another. Mundo Meza’s painting of a brawny merman reclining on a mandolin and rafa esparza’s portrait of himself embedded in the land exemplify how some artists are attempting to decenter an anthropocentric worldview by rejecting any traces of an identifiable landscape that could point to a particular nationalist agenda, cultural context, or even heteronormative conception of humanity. In other artworks, such as Dalton Gata’s painting of a blonde character with her mane ablaze, artists include shape-shifting figures that appear in fellowship with their environment. Their works gesture toward ways of resisting hierarchical structures of power that advance new forms of envisioning the future and the beings that populate it.

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Demons, Xochipilli 'The Flower Prince,' p91 from Indigenous Woman, 2018, printed 2020

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Dalton GataI
Don't Need You To Be Warm, 2021

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Dalton GataI
Don't Need You To Be Warm, 2021

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Don't Need You To Be Warm, 2021

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Southern Assemblage
5
Working with materials sourced from their local environments, self- and community-taught Black artists in the southeastern US have produced hybrid collage-paintings, complex sculptures, and abstractly patterned textiles that derive from their lived experiences. Martha Jane Pettway, one of a group of quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, makes her art from functional remnants—her quilt tops are pieced together from scraps of relatives’ clothes and used sugar sacks. Similarly, Joe Minter’s assembled sculptures share a visual vocabulary with the African Village in America, the immersive sculptural environment that he began working on in his Birmingham, Alabama, backyard in 1989. Purvis Young often portrayed the occupants of his historically segregated neighborhood in Miami on pieces of locally scavenged wood. Alabama artist and musician Lonnie Holley, who since the late 1970s has practiced what he calls “improvisational creativity,” makes sculptures and installations out of salvaged objects, while Bessie Harvey credits her sculptures, made from found wood and branches, to divine inspiration. Through these artists’ vision, everyday materials are transformed into something enduring, carrying the stories of their origins forward.