Field-Based Art Programming As a Facilitator for Transformative Learning Experiences in Tertiary Education: Participants Reflections on Land Arts of the American West

Field-based art programming proposes a different pedagogical model to respond to contemporary challenges that artists face, ranging from ecological crises to the education and development of artists. This article analyzed interviews with field-based art programming participants across two decades, focusing on artists’ experiences through their own voices. Out of the interviews with participants from Land Arts of the American West, in which participants travel, camp, and create at different sites throughout the Southwest, the participants narrate important elements of field-based art programming. Using Mezirow’s theory of Transformative Learning, this article uses participants’ descriptions to analyze the pedagogical aspects of field-based art learning that denotes a transformative experience, distinct from what is available to them in conventional tertiary art classes. Central reoccurring themes identified include immersive nature, art-making, community, and place. Participants’ responses reveal Disorienting Dilemmas and having transformative experiences.

The Desert Blossoms as a Rose. Toward a Western Conservation Aesthetic

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka The “Mormon” Church) offers what believers consider to be the restoration of an original Christianity. This essay explores the grounds for a Latter-day Saint restoration of a once-lost ecological wisdom that could make contemporary settlements in the American West more sustainable, especially where Latter-day Saints have established many communities. While Latter-day Saints and many other settlers of the West considered their work to be a kind of fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy to make the desert “blossom as a rose” through radical environmental transformation, this essay argues for a more aesthetic and ecologically sensitive response to the native qualities of the desert that need protection or even restoration.

Dinosaurs, Racial Anxiety, and Curatorial Intervention: Whiteness and Performative Historiography in the Museum

This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dinosaur fossils in natural history and science museum spaces have been designed to capitalize on and performatively reify white anxiety about the exotic other using the same practices reserved for representing other historic threats to white safety and purity, such as primitive “savages” indigenous to the American West, sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and other untamed wildernesses through survival-of-the-fittest tropes persisting over the last century. Dinosaur others in popular culture have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other. The author examines early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.

Viewing the American West as a Chicana in China

In both scholarly work and popular imagination, the American West is the final destination of migrant from Europe and Mexico. The stories of those migrants, however, obscure the first migration (12,000 BP) from Asia into North America. That migration across the now-submerged land bridge of Beringia ended humanity’s millennia-long journey across the globe that originated in Africa more than 50,000 years earlier. Using two examples, this essay reflects on how the Asian origins of the first Americans have been transformed into myths that conceal humanity’s migratory nature. First, in Chinese Communist propaganda, those origins are transformed into the myth of Peking Man as a branch of humanity originating in China rather than Africa. Second, in the writing of Rudolfo Anaya, those Asian origins are transformed into the myth of homogenous “Brown Brothers” united against white imperialists. Rather than rely on a myth of racial unity in some original homeland, this essay urges reliance on the shared experience of migration and home-making in hostile environments as the true source of our common humanity. Anaya’s Golden Carp, symbol of the life-giving fierce of water in an arid environment, captures this common human predicament stretching from Tibet and Xinjiang to New Mexico, epitomizing the American West as the place where humanity has been reunited, the home to the last wanderers of the human race.