2026/04/01 by Mark A Cheetham, Mark Cheetham, Isabelle Gapp
Environmental Science · Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Polar Research and Ecology #Indigenous Studies and Ecology #Arctic and Russian Policy Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/arthis/ulag017
Abstract This special issue examines art-historical research focused on the polar regions. We ask what implications follow for the field of art history when scholars and artists look towards the far north and far south. While the biases of the disciplinary gaze from and towards Europe, Britain, and the USA have been challenged and decentred for some time, the many recent innovations in circumpolar art history are more than an augmentation of the geographical and cultural ‘coverage’ of art history, significant as that expanded inclusiveness is. Studies of the visual understandings of the poles are pressing in the context of ecocritical art history and important for the globalisation of the field as a whole. Equally important is a careful looking at the specific visual — and more broadly, media — contexts produced in and about these zones by Indigenous peoples, colonisers, and visitors, past and present. In tilting the axes of analysis towards the polar south and polar north, we ask what this reorientation means for conversations within these focus areas and with other, still-dominant geographical and national focuses in art history. How can art historians acknowledge climatic and cultural differences near the poles while avoiding the environmental determinism and polar exceptionalism that tinted most earlier accounts?