Land-Based Art Criticism: (Un)learning Land Through Art

This article provides an overview of how land-based settler colonial critique can re-orient art criticism and art education to expand the scope of art and art practice to critical considerations of land politics and social justice, particularly in terms of the repatriation of Indigenous lands. In particular, land-based perspectives can help to rethink place/land by offering decolonizing methods for critiquing Western works of art that address place. Art educators’ ability to understand and critique settler colonialism in art has been hindered by Eurocentric art criticism. This article seeks to reveal settler colonial imperatives and ambitions regarding land through a critical analysis of American landscape paintings and land art. This piece further examines contemporary Indigenous artists’ site-specific works through adopting decolonial, land-based inquiry. Land-based art criticism interrupts the dominant mode of art inquiry to more comprehensively analyze art associated with place/land and expand the scope of social, cultural, and political understandings of social equity.