- This event has passed.
EXHIBIT – “Dangerous Landscapes”
August 6, 2021 @ 9:00 am - 4:00 pm
An event every week that begins at 9:00 am on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, repeating until September 24, 2021
The University of Alabama Gallery and the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative are proud to present the exhibition, Dangerous Landscapes: Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Progress in the Age of Climate Change, August 6 through September 24, 2021, with a First Friday reception on September 3 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Dangerous Landscapes places contemporary photographs of chemical and fossil fuel industries in West Alabama by artist and Assistant Professor Allison Grant in dialog with large-scale reproductions of nineteenth-century views of progress published in the 1872 two-volume book Picturesque America. “Climate change, the largest environmental challenge of our time,” writes associate professor of history and co-organizer Dr. Teresa Cribelli, “is the result of a continuous escalation of ideas of progress forged in the nineteenth century when coal-fired factories began churning out goods and combustion engines accelerated the movement of people and products across the globe.” Those images symbolized boundless possibility and unending natural resources, notes Cribelli. In viewing Grant’s work next to nineteenth-century woodcut prints and steel engravings, visitors to the exhibition will see “a reoriented view of this romantic landscape—one where human production and consumption have become fully entangled with the natural world,” writes Cribelli.
A panel discussion titled “An Uncertain Climate: Alabama in the Age of Climate Change” will take place on September 21, 2021, from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. in the Camellia Room on the 2nd floor of Gorgas Library. Panelists will be Christine Bassett, Scientist/Engineer III, Cherokee Nation in support of NOAA’s Weather Program Office, Cribelli and Grant.