“Arts and Artists in the Land of Eden” is a lecture about Oregon, but it is also a compact statement of Barbara Sellers-Young’s mature conviction that ecological crisis is inseparable from crisis in perception. The work begins from a familiar regional myth—Oregon as a place of rivers, forests, mountains, desert, and coast, a “Land of Eden”—only to show how inadequate that myth becomes once one attends to the histories of settlement, extraction, damage, cleanup, backlash, and contested stewardship that have shaped the state. What interests Sellers-Young is not simply the gap between image and reality. It is the role artists play in reorganizing that gap. They do not merely illustrate an environmental condition already understood by policy, science, or journalism. They make different modes of attention possible. In doing so, they help produce what she calls an “attitude of sustainability.”
That phrase is characteristic. Sustainability here is not a slogan of resource management alone, and not a technocratic end-state. It names a transformed relation among “humans, society, the economy and the environment,” one that must be cultivated culturally and sensorially as much as legislatively. The lecture’s argument is therefore continuous with Sellers-Young’s long-standing insistence that embodied practice forms consciousness. Earlier in her career, she traced this principle through ritual, dance pedagogy, intercultural transmission, belly dance, and somatic reflexivity. Here the claim is widened to encompass ecological life: one cannot care for a place one has learned to experience merely as backdrop, property, or consumable scenery. Oregon’s artists matter because they alter the ways people see, hear, feel, and remember place.
The lecture opens by staging the doubleness of Oregon’s self-image. On one side is the celebratory narrative of exceptional landscape: “high desert, Columbia gorge and plateau, Cascade Range, Willamette Valley, Rogue River and the Coast and Costal Mountains”; newspaper invitations to “walk trails through ancient forests,” “discover hidden lakes,” and marvel at wildflowers and hot springs; the persistent romance of scenic abundance. On the other side is what Sellers-Young, drawing on the historical framing of Artists Activating Sustainability: The Oregon Story, identifies as a more difficult history: the land used “as a resource for agriculture, logging, fishing and mining,” degraded by intensive extraction and by population influx, then partially defended through 1970s environmental reforms that produced fierce backlash. Oregon became, in William Robbins’s phrase, “a landscape of conflict.”
The importance of this historical turn is easy to miss if one reads the talk merely as regional appreciation. Sellers-Young is not correcting romantic boosterism with a dour realism for its own sake. She is demonstrating that aesthetic consciousness is politically implicated. The “Land of Eden” is not just an innocent image; it is a cultural framing that can obscure use, labor, dispossession, and environmental stress. Yet she does not simply discard the aesthetic. Rather, she asks how aesthetic practice might be turned against aesthetic simplification. This is one of the lecture’s governing tensions: the same impulse that mythologizes landscape can, when disciplined by reflection, become a medium for ecological knowledge.
To explain how, Sellers-Young introduces a modest but consequential conceptual frame. Citing David Le Breton, she describes the artist’s relation to place as “a perceptual conception of the world based on an interaction of individual sensory systems with the environment.” The phrase places perception at the center of the ecological problem. Landscapes are not given as neutral objects; they are constituted through bodily encounter. This proposition has deep roots in Sellers-Young’s larger body of work. She has repeatedly argued that movement and sensory training shape not only performance but thought itself, and that technique is never neutral because it trains what can be noticed, valued, and acted upon. In this lecture, art becomes a public version of that process. An artist’s practiced encounter with place is translated into form; that form, in turn, retrains the audience’s sensorium.
The three principal case studies are selected with care because they activate different sensory registers and different relations to place. James Lavadour works through painting and geology, Hunter Noack through listening and site-specific musical performance, Angela Pozzi through sculptural transformation of marine waste. The lecture’s structure thus moves from visual-tactile abstraction, to auditory immersion, to material confrontation. These are not interchangeable examples of “environmental art.” Each reveals a distinct pathway by which art can make the world newly apprehensible.
Lavadour appears first, and with him the lecture clarifies what it means to treat landscape as process rather than surface. Growing up on the Umatilla Indian Reservation among the Blue Mountains, he learned place not as an empty vista but as eventful relation: “The landscape was a network of events, of places where things happened. The mountains were our living room.” Sellers-Young seizes on this sentence because it condenses an entire ontology of place. Landscape is domestic and historical, intimate rather than scenic, lived rather than looked at. Such phrasing also quietly counters the settler habit of imagining the land as open visual field awaiting appreciation or use.
Lavadour’s own account of painting pushes this further. He approaches nature “as a way of learning about who I am and what I am,” but that learning is not contemplative in a detached sense. It comes from “the physical act of engaging with nature,” from walking, touching water, lying on the earth, drinking after exertion—experience sedimented as “body memory” and “muscle memory.” Sellers-Young’s choice to dwell on these phrases is no accident. Throughout her career, she has resisted the reduction of knowledge to verbal analysis or visual representation; here, body memory becomes the ground of landscape art. The painter does not copy nature from outside. He works from incorporated encounter.
That incorporated encounter is then formalized in paint. Sellers-Young notes that a Lavadour canvas often follows the spatial sensation of moving through landscape—“a horizon, middle ground and foreground”—but without yielding to straightforward depiction. In the Tiicham paintings, “our land,” layered pigment, scraping, exposed strata, and “bold colors and slashes of energy” evoke geologic and climatic transformation itself. She emphasizes the processual character of the technique: paint is laid down, removed, re-revealed. The canvas becomes a temporal surface, one in which accretion and erosion are mimed materially. This is a precise instance of the lecture’s larger claim. Sustainability requires an imagination adequate to ongoing transformation. Lavadour’s paintings ask the viewer to perceive land as unstable, storied, and alive with force; they interrupt the fantasy of nature as fixed scenery.
The description of his working method intensifies the point. He works on many canvases at once, often over years, without forcing completion. Exhibited in panels, the paintings generate “an integrated landscape of distinct viewpoints.” This open-ended seriality matters. It proposes an ecological epistemology of patience, incompletion, and multiplicity. The artist does not master the land through a single framing; he allows forms to emerge relationally. His own statement that painting is “a structural record for time and space” and that art, science, and technology together form “the human reflective faculty” gives Sellers-Young a bridge she will use repeatedly in the lecture: artistic practice is not the decorative supplement to knowledge but one mode of reflective inquiry among others.
This relation between art and science is not presented as a merger or equivalence. Sellers-Young is too attentive to medium and practice for that. What she proposes instead is complementarity grounded in shared reflective discipline. Lavadour’s work exemplifies this because it neither illustrates scientific data nor retreats into private expression. It enters what he calls “the unknown” and returns “gems of knowledge and wisdom.” The vocabulary is almost spiritual, but the underlying claim is epistemological. Art discovers by dwelling in process.
The second case study, Hunter Noack, shifts from vision and touch to listening. The movement is important: the lecture broadens ecological consciousness beyond the visual dominance that often organizes environmental appreciation. Noack’s childhood in Sunriver and central Oregon joins outdoor immersion to classical piano training. He learns from river, forest, hunting, shifting light, and “the deep listening necessary to be aware of the movement of birds and other animals.” His succinct formulation—“music is listening”—becomes the hinge of Sellers-Young’s reading.
Noack’s now well-known project of carrying a grand piano into outdoor Oregon locations could easily be described as spectacle, and the lecture deliberately steers away from that reduction. What matters is not novelty but site-responsive listening. Standing in the Columbia Gorge, he sees “a billion-dollar set just waiting for music,” but Sellers-Young’s treatment of the project carefully revises the theatricality of that phrase. The landscape is not a stage set in the passive sense. It becomes an active participant in the concert event. Audiences are kept intimate; wireless headphones can be worn or not worn; one listens personally and collectively at once. The result is not simply a concert outdoors but a recalibration of auditory attention.
Sellers-Young is especially good at identifying the subtle reciprocity this creates. Temperature affects touch at the keyboard. A bird call may cause the pianist to “linger on a note.” Smell, air, animal presence, and ambient sound inflect the performance. Nature, in her phrasing, becomes an “active participant.” This is a small but decisive shift away from representational thinking. The concert does not symbolize the environment; it is co-composed with it. Noack’s work thus trains what might be called ecological listening: an awareness that human artifice and nonhuman soundscape are not sealed apart.
That emphasis resonates strongly with Sellers-Young’s broader somatic commitments. In her writing on actor training and contemplative pedagogy, listening is never merely acoustic reception; it is a disciplined bodily orientation, a readiness to be altered by what is encountered. Noack’s performances extend that principle into environmental aesthetics. His audiences become aware, as he says, of “the preciousness of being here now.” The phrase risks sentimentality in less careful hands, but within the structure of the lecture it names something more exact: ecological consciousness as heightened present-tense relation, not abstract concern alone. If Lavadour teaches geological duration, Noack teaches atmospheric immediacy.
Angela Pozzi’s work on the Oregon coast introduces a third mode of artistic ecological intervention: material pedagogy through waste. Pozzi’s biography, as Sellers-Young frames it, is again one of early formation at the intersection of art and nature. Childhood experimentation with discarded materials and exploratory summers in Bandon establish a continuity between imaginative play and marine environment. That continuity becomes ethically sharpened after her husband’s death, when she returns to Bandon, encounters beaches strewn with plastic, and decides that “garbage plucked from the beach would be her sole source of art supplies.”
The power of Sellers-Young’s treatment lies in her refusal to oppose beauty and critique. Pozzi’s sea-creature sculptures are whimsical, inventive, often immediately attractive; they draw the viewer in through familiarity, color, and imaginative assembly. Yet the inventory of materials—bottle caps, flip-flops, lighters, toy wheels, toothbrushes, shotgun shells, toilet seats—delivers a shock of recognition. Pleasure becomes the condition for confrontation. The sculptures “speak loudly of the sea’s degradation” precisely because they stage the afterlife of everyday consumption in forms one wants to love. This is ecological pedagogy by aesthetic ambivalence.
Pozzi’s significance in the lecture also exceeds individual artistry. Sellers-Young highlights the founding of Washed Ashore and the ARTULA Institute, the large volunteer base, the tons of removed garbage, the touring sculptures. Here art becomes infrastructural and communal. It is not only an object of contemplation but a social process that mobilizes labor, education, and public encounter. This too is consistent with Sellers-Young’s larger thinking. Across her studies of community performance and sanctuary practice, she has treated art as a procedure for making relation rather than as product alone. Pozzi’s project does precisely that: it converts pollution into a participatory civic art practice.
After these three artists, the lecture broadens its frame by turning explicitly to “Reflection as a Path of Knowledge.” This section is brief, but it is central to the lecture’s intellectual architecture. Signal Fire sends urban artists into forests and rivers to transform “their urbanized imagination” through backpacking, paddling, dawn watching, and nighttime listening. Elizabeth Jones Gallery artists gather around threatened Portland trees and document neighborhood ecologies. The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology brings artists and scientists into residence and asks each to choose a place for “reflection and meditative release into the ecology of place.” In each case, Sellers-Young emphasizes immersion, observation, sensory retraining, and disciplined contemplation.
This is where the lecture most clearly extends Sellers-Young’s long effort to contest the academy’s narrowing of knowledge to verbal-analytic modes. Reflection, in her usage, is not detached thought hovering over experience. It is place-based, sensory, iterative, and often meditative. The Sitka model is especially revealing because it presents art and science as parallel practices of attention rather than competing authorities. Both require a willingness to inhabit uncertainty, to observe patiently, and to let a site disclose its problems and possibilities. Sellers-Young has often argued that performance and somatic work offer forms of critical thinking unavailable to purely discursive education; here that proposition is translated into ecological humanities. To know a place, one must spend time with it, bodily and reflectively.
The lecture’s later turn to history and identity prevents this ecological emphasis from drifting into generalized nature reverence. Sustainability, Sellers-Young insists, is inseparable from local social worlds. This insistence is one of the most important features of the piece, because it guards against a familiar tendency in environmental discourse to treat “nature” as if it stood outside culture, labor, and contested belonging. Vale’s Heritage Reflections murals, for example, matter because they render visible the many peoples tied to Malheur County’s landscape: Paiute communities, fur traders, Oregon Trail migrants, Basque shepherds, Chinese railroad workers, Japanese American farmers, Mexican vaqueros. Sellers-Young does not romanticize muralism as automatic reconciliation. Her point is more measured: “An appreciation of unique identities and related arts builds mutual respect that is a key to collaboration and compromise.” Ecological futures require social legibility. People must be able to see themselves, and one another, in the place they share.
This concern with plural histories has deep affinities with Sellers-Young’s earlier work on diaspora and intercultural transmission. There too she argued that forms and identities are carried in bodies, institutions, and local practices rather than in abstract categories. In “Arts and Artists in the Land of Eden,” the focus is no longer Japanese dance or global belly dance but the local sedimentation of cultural memory within Oregon landscapes. The continuity lies in method: embodied and artistic practices are read as media through which communities negotiate belonging.
The same is true of her invocation of Sanctuary Stage and the Oregon Country Fair. Sanctuary Stage “does not start with a script.” It begins with “the concerns of a micro-community” discovered in “a sanctuary space of non-judgmental dialogue”; performance then becomes a platform for further conversation. The Country Fair is valued less for any single artwork than for an organizational ethos of “communication and consensus building” in which the unforeseen is met by “a responsive playful attitude towards life as an ever-evolving improvisation.” These examples might initially seem peripheral to the lecture’s environmental focus, but they are not. They introduce a procedural account of sustainability. Ecological crisis demands communities capable of collaboration, improvisation, and care under changing conditions. The arts help cultivate these capacities not only by representing issues but by rehearsing social forms.
Improvisation is especially significant here. In Sellers-Young’s writing on dance, improvisation is never simply spontaneity; it is disciplined responsiveness within shared conditions. That understanding quietly shapes this lecture as well. Sustainable life in a damaged world cannot be reduced to rigid plans or static ideals. It requires adaptive, relational practice—what the lecture’s final pages call “flexible improvisation and collaboration.” This is one reason the closing citation of Emma Marris is so apt. Oregonians must relinquish the dream of untouched wilderness and learn to inhabit a “half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us.” Sellers-Young’s own final sentence—“Oregon’s artists provide a set of interactive practices for tending that garden”—is not ornamental rhetoric. It distills the lecture’s entire intervention.
What is being challenged, throughout, is the assumption that environmental action begins with information and policy alone. Sellers-Young does not deny the necessity of either; the lecture repeatedly acknowledges land-use planning, resource conflict, drought, water scarcity, and fire. But she insists that such issues cannot be met adequately without transformed habits of perception and relation. This is a subtle but consequential correction to both utilitarian environmentalism and reductive arts advocacy. The arts are not justified here because they package messages more attractively than science does. Nor are they protected as autonomous realms of beauty. They are treated as practices that generate ecological understanding by reorganizing sensory life, public feeling, historical awareness, and communal process.
That claim situates the lecture clearly within the later arc of Sellers-Young’s career. It belongs with her work on arts and sustainability, but it also gathers earlier concerns into a new constellation. The anti-Cartesian commitment remains: knowledge is embodied. The critique of abstraction remains: consciousness is formed by concrete practices. The insistence on context remains: landscape must be understood historically and socially, not merely visually. The interest in community remains: art creates temporary but meaningful spaces of recognition and concord. What is newer is the scale at which these ideas are assembled. Oregon itself becomes a kind of event-context, a regional performance ecology in which geology, environmental history, settler narrative, Indigenous presence, artistic process, local memory, and civic improvisation all interact.
The lecture’s elegance lies in the way it avoids both triumphalism and despair. Oregon is neither Eden nor ruin. It is a conflicted, damaged, inhabited place that requires more supple forms of care than the old myths permit. The artists Sellers-Young chooses are persuasive precisely because they do not offer redemption fantasies. Lavadour does not restore pristine nature; he teaches viewers to perceive transformation and depth. Noack does not purify culture by returning music to nature; he composes with contingency and atmosphere. Pozzi does not erase waste; she re-presents it so forcefully that denial becomes harder to sustain. The muralists, community performers, and arts organizations do not solve conflict; they cultivate the mutual recognition and adaptive process without which conflict hardens into paralysis.
In that sense, “Arts and Artists in the Land of Eden” is less a celebration of Oregon art than a theory of what art can do under ecological pressure. It can make a place newly sensible. It can disclose buried histories within familiar terrain. It can train patience, listening, and reflective attention. It can give communities procedures for speaking across difference. It can make damage visible without surrendering imagination. And it can help move a culture from longing for an untouched paradise toward learning the harder practice of tending a shared, unstable world.
Reflect with VABS