What Grows Inside the "White Cube:" Contending With New Climate Futures by Queering the Anthropological and Anthropologizing the Queer Inside the Modernist Art Gallery

Abstract

What happens when Delcy Morelos brings dirt from the Hudson Valley into her gallery exhibition in New York City? How about when April Bey grows Calathea plants just outside the doors to her solo show in Los Angeles? In pursuit of these questions, I spent seven months developing a body of artwork and autoethnographic reflections which embodied queer ecological and anthropological theory. I explore new and utopian visions of climate futures while combining decolonial and environmental theory across disciplines and communities. My work participates in ongoing ideological, dialectical, and landscape shifts modeled by other contemporary artists’ unique mobilization of natural conservation inside “White Cube” style galleries (Tyburczy 2015, Hutton 2021, Dungy 2017, Allen 2019, Whyte 2017, Kimmerer 2015). When the boundaries of disciplinarity are uninhibited, queering as method illuminates knowledge and mastery among different communities that can have a profound impact on reshaping conceptions of environmental futurity and revealing new realities (Allen 2019, Petryna 2022, Trouillot 1995).