Curating Ocean Worlds

The goal of this course is to wade into the many ways the ocean has been represented in visual, literary, and material culture and to encourage students, through analytic and critical writing, to probe the limits of that representation. The ocean is increasingly central to conversations around climate crisis, and yet there is still so much about the world’s vast seas that remains unknown. How, historically, have art and visual culture helped to reckon with the seeming unknowability of oceans’ depths? From iconic texts like Moby Dick and the classic seascapes of Turner to contemporary artists reckoning with fraught issues of migration, Indigenous sovereignty, and environmental destruction, art helps to communicate what might otherwise go unseen. For students’ final projects, they collectively curated this exhibition that brings forward new dimensions of oceanic art, illuminated by their words.