Summer Intensive 2025: Art and Climate Change
This summer’s Art and Research program at ICA Miami focuses on climate change, cultural production, and ecocriticism through a global lens. Bringing together scholars of art history, literature, and the visual arts, this seminar series will explore the intersection between environment, art and literature to examine how aesthetic works shape our understanding of environmental issues. Seminars will trace how the ongoing climate crisis has shifted our basic beliefs surrounding nature, human relationships, the non-human, the role of technology and its global manifestations across the world. Faculty will lead students in a set of discussions that turn to art and artists as a way to think through climate and culture. In addition to the graduate-level seminars, this Summer Intensive will culminate in a mini symposium with two public talks and conversation between Joshua Shannon, Stephanie Wakefield and Donna Honarpisheh that will open up for audience engagement.
The crisis of climate change requires technical and political solutions, but it also requires the remaking of some of our most basic beliefs—thoughts we rarely question about nature, human beings, and the relationships between them. This seminar invites participants to consider how art can help us both grasp our predicament and think a way out of it. Key artworks from the last 150 years, looked at with climate in mind, can help us let go of beliefs we inherited from modern industrial society and wake up instead to our place within global ecology. The seminar is divided into three meetings: “The Climate Uncanny,” “Suffering & Resilience,” and “Abandoning Man/Forgetting Nature.”
Joshua Shannon
Joshua Shannon is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. His scholarship and teaching focus on art since 1945 and its relationships to social and cultural history, with special interests in ecology, landscape, and cities. He is currently completing a book called How and Why to Look at Art in the Time of Climate Change: Seven Lessons from Modern Art (under contract, University of California Press). His previous books are The Disappearance of Objects (Yale, 2009), The Recording Machine (Yale, 2017), and Humans (Terra/Chicago, 2021). He has held visiting professorships at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Hong Kong.
Joshua Shannon: How and Why to Look at Art in the Time of Climate Change
Seminar 1
Mon, Aug 11, 2025
10:30 am to 12:30 pm
Seminar 2
Tue, Aug 12, 2025
10:30 am to 12:30 pm
Seminar 3
Wed, Aug 13, 2025
10:30 am to 12:30 pm
Lecture: Trees and Fungus, or Living Relationally: The Art of Wangechi Mutu
Thu, Aug 14, 2025
2:00 pm to 5:00 pm
