The Environment

About

Artists have painted landscape for centuries, but art concerned with ecology as a public question took shape from the late 1960s, alongside the modern environmental movement. Some works repair or reclaim land. Alan Sonfist's Time Landscape, proposed in 1965 and planted in 1978, restored a patch of pre-colonial forest in lower Manhattan, and Agnes Denes's Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982) grew two acres of wheat on landfill a few blocks from Wall Street. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison spent decades developing proposals for rivers, watersheds and farmland with scientists and planners.

Others borrow the tools of science. Mel Chin's Revival Field (begun 1990) planted species that draw heavy metals out of polluted soil. Olafur Eliasson and the geologist Minik Rosing brought melting blocks of Greenland ice to public squares in Ice Watch (2014). Chris Jordan photographs the bodies of albatross chicks on Midway Atoll, their stomachs full of plastic.