This project-based learning unit invites students to respond to a call for artworks from the Urban Ecology Center in Wisconsin. The call for artworks seeks local artists who will engage with the Center’s mission to inspire change based in an understanding of nature. To prepare, students study landscape paintings from the Hudson River School alongside contemporary ecologically-based art to prepare to formulate their own perspective and vocabulary for communicating their position on the relationship between nature and people understanding, issuing a call for change.

This unit works well alongside a study of environmental science or American studies. In particular, studies in Social Studies or English Language Arts on Manifest Destiny and expansion, industrialization and urbanization, American Renaissance in literature, Transcendentalism, or environmental writing are well aligned to the aims of this unit.

This curriculum can be modified for teaching in Grade 7-12, and is aligned to Common Core and National Visual Arts Standards.