Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970

Giovanni Aloi
Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums
September 17, 2021–January 16, 2022
Cow and horse grazing at Plenemuk burial mound site, January 1, 1997, from the series Disarming the Prairie, 1997.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Harvard Art Museums
Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums
September 17, 2021–January 16, 2022
Climate change and social justice have finally become a hot topic in contemporary art. Right now, the most incisive exhibitions combine both, highlighting the inescapable continuity between the two. This is nature in the Anthropocene. No longer a remote place of unaltered beauty, but a precarious all-encompassing condition we have singlehandedly created and in which we are always wholly implicated.  

Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography since 1970, on show at the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums is an impressive example of how art can help us grasp a critical situation we have ignored far too long. The exhibition features approximately 160 photographs grouped around 6 themes— Silent Spring, Arming America, Slow Violence, Regeneration, Other Battlefields, and Resistance—which illustrate the often otherwise invisible ways the US military has impacted, at times irreversibly, the land. 

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