Art and Geography

Landscapes and Representation

Geographers have long been interested in studying the visual arts. In particular, geographers have looked at art such as landscape paintings as texts that reveal the influence of particular places on the artists’ work as well as broader themes of climate change, attitudes toward and interactions with nature, and regional and national consciousness. In the 1980s, Stephen Daniels politically interpreted 19th-century English paintings to raise issues of how land is represented, changing social and power relations, and the sense of belonging. Likewise, Cosgrove noted that geographers needed to view landscape as more than an areal concept and to take on the view of artists (i.e., painters, literary writers, poets, and novelists) who explored links between landscape, perspective, and visual ideology. Recently, geographers influenced by Cosgrove and Daniels have studied disparate art and themes, such as the discourse of antiurbanism in Edward Hopper's paintings and murals in postapartheid South Africa, which provide insights into changing cultures and places and increasingly present local struggles over place, environment, identity, and history.

Geography and the Production of Art

Cultural geographers such as Donald Meinig and Yi-Fu Tuan have called on geographers to produce works of art. In his article “Geography as an Art,” Meinig noted that although geography has been described as both an art and a science, geography has tenuous links to the humanities. He felt that even much of humanistic geography remained tied to the sciences, with its analytical frameworks used to examine behavior and meaning through art and literature. Consequently, Meinig suggested that geographers become creators of literature and pointed to the few examples where regional geographic interpretations moved into the world of creative literature (i.e., Estryn Evans's Mourne Country: Landscape and Life in South Down, William Bunge's Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution, and Henry Glassie's Passing the Time in Ballymenone). Meinig suggested that other geographers make the shift from science to emotional, personal statements of art by following the example of sociologist Raymond Williams and his novel The Country and the City.

Perhaps in response to Meinig's charge, geo graphers have increasingly been involved in the production of creative works. New outlets for publishing geography as an art have surfaced, including Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, which explores links between cultural politics, cultural industries, lived experiences, and the imagination, and You are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, which delves into the concept of place through creative works including articles, fiction, poetry, essays, maps, photographs, and artwork.

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