Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, Department of Art and Art History, 2016.
This study analyzes New Mexico and the Greater Southwest’s conflicted place between
the U.S. and Mexico within art and visual culture, from the nineteenth century into the
present. Over the course of four case studies, "Connected in Isolation: Land and
Landscape in New Mexico and the Greater Southwest" investigates disparate political
and aesthetic imaginaries centering on land, especially following the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo in 1848. After the Mexican American War and the ensuing Treaty, the United
States annexed more than half of Mexico's holdings, including much of the current
southwestern region, which had seen Mexican and Spanish systems of governance in
prior centuries. The advent of American Imperialism accelerated Anglo expansion into
the region and proffered narratives of "discovery" about land, resources and people. The
incongruous forms of land use that resulted reveal epistemological divides in how land
and space were and continue to be conceptualized, occupied and represented. In
particular, I examine how race, class and ethnicity produce space, spatial subjectivities
and representational modes across media: cartography, painting, photography and land
art. Building upon diverse literature on the history of westward expansion, land grant
history and the emergence of artist colonies and a southwestern aesthetic imagination, I
examine how the idea of the Southwest as a rugged final frontier for expansion and
aesthetic transcendence intersects with complex histories of tenure, cosmologies and
experiential engagements. The first chapter analyzes how American expansion was a
spatial and discursive process that pitted the ideology of the national grid against other
regional modes of cartography over the course of the nineteenth century. The second
chapter explores spatial subjectivities that center on loss (from the loss of ancestral lands to the lamentations of modernization), examining in particular how penitence is practiced
locally and co-opted by eastern transplants in the years bookending World War I. The
following chapter looks at the post-World War II emergence of land art and its
relationship to histories of westward expansion, landscape painting, minimalism and
counterculture. The last chapter analyzes a contemporary land-based collaboration on the
Navajo Nation and its relationship to indigenous cosmology, identity politics and
globalization.
