Event Description

Connecting Disciplines: “Inventing Wilderness: Public History, Historical Geography, and the Cultural Landscape” featuring Susan W. Knowles, Huhta Post-Doctoral Fellow, Center for Historic Preservation, Middle Tennessee State University

Meet at exhibition entrance
Gallery admission required; members free

In this gallery talk, Susan Knowles will consider geographer and philosopher John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s seminal 1980 essay, “The Necessity for Ruins,” in which he argued that critical interpretation of landscape structures should include ruin. Like Edward Burtynsky, Jackson found beauty in the reminders of human endeavor. Today’s tools of geoscience, such as digital mapping, and the expanding universe of data capture technologies are prompting ever deeper reflections on the human relationship to the natural world.