single-author monograph / 2022

Artists Activating Sustainability: The Oregon Story

Barbara Sellers-Young

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Description

This book expands Sellers-Young's embodied philosophy into sustainability and place-based arts. Oregon is presented not as untouched Eden, but as a complex landscape shaped by Indigenous presence, settlement, extraction, land-use conflict, wildfire, drought, tourism, and local memory. Artists matter because they can make these layered relations perceptible, affective, and publicly discussable.

The book's examples show sustainability as cultural and somatic as well as ecological. James Lavadour's paintings open geological and Indigenous place-time; Hunter Noack turns landscape into a listening environment; Angela Pozzi transforms marine waste into public pedagogy; murals, dance, and community performance sustain memory and belonging. Sellers-Young's central claim is that art can train perception toward interdependence. Policy and science remain necessary, but artistic practice helps communities feel, narrate, and inhabit the relations that sustainability requires.

Metadata

Typesingle-author monograph
Year2022
Era 2022-2024: Sustainability, Oregon, Urban Diaspora, and Place-Based Art i

2022-2024: Sustainability, Oregon, Urban Diaspora, and Place-Based Art

The sustainability work is a major widening of scale. Sellers-Young now asks how artists activate ecological and cultural sustainability. Oregon becomes the case: not untouched Eden, but a conflicted landscape shaped by Indigenous presence, settlement, extraction, planning, wildfire, drought, tourism, and local memory.

Her concept of sustainability includes environment, culture, memory, social relation, economic survival, and community identity. Art matters because it trains perception and relation. Lavadour makes geology and Indigenous place-memory felt; Noack turns landscape into a co-performer through listening; Pozzi makes plastic waste materially and emotionally legible; murals preserve layered local histories; community performance creates civic dialogue.

The Yasmina Ramzy work applies earlier belly dance concerns to a multicultural urban institution. Arabesque in Toronto is neither simple preservation nor generic fusion. It is a local/global/local formation that stages Middle Eastern dance for a diaspora and multicultural public, using tarab, ensemble choreography, Egyptian musical centrality, and spiritual reinterpretation to counter reductive Orientalist images.

Continuity: art is embodied knowledge and social world-making.

Expansion: place becomes not background but collaborator.

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AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
PublisherAnthem Press
DOI10.2307/j.ctv307fgw6
ISBN978-1-78527-912-6; 978-1-78527-913-3; 978-1-78527-914-0
Roleprimary author

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Analysis

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Barbara Sellers-Young’s Artists Activating Sustainability: The Oregon Story marks a significant enlargement of concerns that have animated her work for decades. The book is about Oregon, certainly, and about artists working there in relation to wildfire, land use, community memory, and ecological precarity. But more deeply it is about a question that has become increasingly urgent in the arts humanities: by what means do people come to perceive environment not as inert backdrop or resource stockpile, but as a lived field of interdependence in which memory, livelihood, conflict, and imagination are inseparable? Sellers-Young’s answer is characteristically embodied. Sustainability, in this account, cannot be reduced to...

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