Teaching Wall / Environmental Justice, Art, and Race

This group of works from BAMPFA's collection is presented in connection with Ethnic Studies 180, an undergraduate course at UC Berkeley that focuses on artistic practices engaged with issues of environmental racism. An idea popularized by African American civil rights lawyers and activists such as Adjoa Aiyetoro and Benjamin Chavis in the 1970s and 1980s, environmental racism describes the role of racial discrimination in policymaking that results in communities of color disproportionately bearing the consequences of hazardous waste exposure, natural disasters, resource extraction, farming practices, deforestation, and pollution. Throughout the course, students consider a collection of artistic and activist practices that illuminate the social structures underlying these types of environmental harm and their unseen, often fatal, costs—especially as they impact Indigenous lands and racialized communities. In this gallery, artworks appear in thematic groupings that call attention to labor conditions for farmworkers, fire's chemical and symbolic power, and the more sinister dimensions of cultivating cash crops like cotton, rice, and sugar. Considered alongside readings and film screenings, these works ask what role art can play in imagining alternate social and ecological relationships.