Tuesday, September 10, 2024 5:30pm to 7pm
About this Event
1327 Circle Park, Knoxville, TN 37996
Understanding forests of the past helps us to understand current forest ecosystems and how they may change in the future. In this talk ecologist, Dana Warren, forest pathologist, David Shaw, and art historian, Harper Loeb, demonstrate how collaboration between art historians and scientists can unpack the complexities and potential opportunities that 19th century landscape art has to capture and quantify environmental change in eastern forests.
Historic landscape paintings are a potential treasure trove of information about the past with images that include early color depictions of forest and stream environments. However, the use of these images in ecological research has been hampered by questions of image validity: How truly accurate are the images portrayed in these paintings? Shaw, Loeb, and Warren present the results of an interdisciplinary project applying methods and knowledge from the humanities and from ecological sciences to answer this question.
This lecture is being presented in conjunction with the McClung Museum's exhibition Coming into View, which is on display through December 8, 2024.
Dana Warren is an associate professor in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University. He is an ecologist whose research focuses on the interactions between streams and forests and how changes to the terrestrial environment affect stream ecosystems and fish. Warren began thinking about the potential to use paintings as a tool to understand pre-industrial forest landscapes during graduate school in upstate New York, but was stuck for 20 years over question of image validity. It was only when he connected with art historians Peter Betjemann, Eleanor Harvey, and Harper Loeb and began an interdisciplinary research effort that he was able to finally open what is an exciting and emerging line of inquiry in the study of environmental change.
Harper Loeb is a PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. She studies art of the Americas with an emphasis on 19th-century American landscape painting and Ecocritical Art History. She is particularly interested in using landscape painting to reconstruct historic forest conditions in the eastern U.S.
David Shaw is a retired (in March of 2024) Professor of Forest Health in the Department of Forest Engineering, Resources, and Management, and a Forestry and Natural Resources Extension Forest Health Specialist at Oregon State University. He was also Director of the Swiss Needle Cast Cooperative, a research cooperative focused on a foliage disease of Douglas-fir. His work has focused on forest biology and ecology, forest pathology, forest entomology, and silviculture.
Funding for the McClung Museum’s educational programming has been provided by the Knox County Tourism Consortium.