Water's Hand

Inside Art 350, where studying art history reveals insights about our changing climate.

A Return to the Sea

On a typical overcast Portland day in early November, the class sits quietly in Reed’s Hauser Memorial Library basement. Save for a leaf blower whirring outside—and a dog barking at it—the space is totally silent as the clock ticks on. The students all stare at a projector screen displaying John Singleton Copley’s A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, willing the painting to reveal new clues to them. A whole nine minutes pass before Prof. Shivani Sud [art history and humanities] finally breaks the silence and asks, “Now, what did you notice?”

The portrait depicts the artist’s stepbrother, Henry Pelham, holding a gold chain leashed to a pet squirrel. A half-full—or half-empty, depending on your perspective—glass of water sits in front of the subject. It’s the only water featured in the painting, and yet, Sud wants her Art 350: Oceans, Rains, Rivers, Pools: Histories of Water students to inspect it closely. Art historian and Harvard University professor Jennifer Roberts says she requires her own students to stare at works like Copley’s for three full hours before they can even begin writing about them. “I’m not going to make you stare at this for three hours,” Sud assured the class before they started their analysis, much to their relief. But she did set the timer for nine minutes, an uncomfortably long period to focus on a work of art. 

The activity yields results, though. In the discussion that follows, a student points out that since you get bored looking for so long, you start to search for new things to notice. Some say they paid more attention to the rich colors and textures of the painting as time went on. One admits that around minute eight they started to contemplate the direction of the subject’s gaze—what exactly is Henry looking at? “Just because we’ve looked at something doesn’t mean we’re really seeing,” Sud says. And by staring at the boy and his squirrel for an extended time, students learn not just to look, but to see.

Closely examining art, like in many art history classes, is an every-session occurrence for Sud’s course. But Art 350 specifically asks students to consider the role of a particular element in art—water. Sud invites them to contemplate: How is water depicted across time? What can art portraying lakes, rivers, and oceans tell us about colonization, climate change, and the history of our environment? The class raises questions about water’s role in art, even when it’s not the main subject, as in Copley’s famous painting.

In 1765, Copley sent the work on a transatlantic journey from Boston, Massachusetts, to London, England, in search of feedback from artists he admired. He had to wait months for the painting to reach London, more months to see feedback, and then even more months to receive clarification on the feedback (which was, thankfully, mostly positive). The only water actually present in A Boy with a Flying Squirrel is that small glass in the bottom left corner, but geographic and temporal intervals related to water profoundly affected Copley’s painting. Rapid transportation in our era has made the experience of long-distance journeys over water an overlooked aspect of movement. Sud wanted to defamiliarize contemporary notions of travel to help students explore water’s role in shaping culture.

Art can hold clues to our past, which can ultimately inform our present and future. (As just one recent example, journalist Mark Schapiro reported a story for Smithsonian Magazine in November 2024 on an Italian woman investigating art for clues about forgotten produce, which she helps farmers bring back into cultivation.) But a 2017 study in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts found most museum patrons only look at works of art for an average of 27 seconds. In this art history course, students learn how to slow down, analyze, and make new observations about artworks ranging in time, place, and medium, from 16th-century Indian watercolor paintings to 21st-century Arctic photographs.

Offered as part of Reed’s new Environmental Humanities initiative, Art 350 centers interdisciplinarity and collaboration. Funded by the Mellon Foundation and led by principal investigator Prof. Sarah Wagner-McCoy [English and humanities] and co–principal investigator Prof. Kristin Scheible [religion and humanities], the EH program connects diverse fields of study—from art and music to history and political science—to urgent, complex questions of social and environmental justice. The initiative provides opportunities for faculty to develop and improve their curricula with summer incubators, an opportunity Sud took advantage of in 2023 to reimagine Art 350. ​​“The summer incubators have been transformative across the college,” says Kathy Oleson, dean of faculty and Patricia and Clifford Lunneborg Professor of Psychology. “They are not only the catalysts for new, intellectually rich interdisciplinary courses like Sud’s Histories of Water, but are also hubs for faculty collaboration and scholarly exchange.”

Sud says the incubator led her to incorporate more insights from environmental humanities and explore new topics, including critical animal studies and new materialism, which she later brought to her students. The class examines art, reads poetry, watches films, and comes to understand water’s hand in cultural and artistic histories, informed by disciplines like environmental science and anthropology.

Conservationist Rachel Carson predicted in 1951 that humans would one day make a return to the sea from which they came, but this time, they’d do so “mentally and imaginatively.” This is the driving principle of the blue humanities, a subfield of environmental humanities that emerged in the early 21st century and has gained traction in recent years. Coined by St. John’s University English professor Steve Mentz, the blue humanities asks people to consider human relationships with water, whether it be fresh water, our oceans, ice, or even water vapor. Colleges like Stanford University and Arizona State University have started implementing blue humanities curriculum and initiatives.

By studying the blue humanities, historian John R. Gillis says we can return to our beginnings, and, in understanding the world’s water, learn to better understand the world as a whole. Sud, who completed her PhD in art history from UC Berkeley before arriving at Reed, situates water-centered art in a global context, wielding her expertise on South Asian art, environmental histories, and colonial visual cultures. The first summer incubator also supported other faculty developing courses around the oceanic turn. Inspired by this work, Wagner-McCoy designed a new blue humanities course in the second round of workshops: English 341: Humanity at Sea: Personhood from Moby Dick to Moby Doll.

Students in Sud’s course lead class discussions, and, as a final project, develop their own 10-week course plans focused around an element depicted in art—examples from the fall class include natural earth elements in Aztec art and fire imagery in European works. Students are often inundated with writing assignments, particularly seniors who are working on their theses. “So, I did not want students to write a long research paper, but I did want students to conduct research, critically analyze sources, and think creatively,” Sud says. She encourages students to teach the courses they design at Paideia. 

Along the way, students become equipped to unravel mysteries about our aquatic environments and grapple with their own relationships to the world’s water. By exploring religious depictions of water, colonial histories, historical and modern-day responses to climate change, and more, students make a return to the sea—and other bodies of water—not only to ask, but to answer pressing questions related to our environment and our society. Sud says of the class, “We’re not only thinking about water as a subject of history, but really as a methodological approach by which to study history.”

The Ocean as an Archive

In 1725, a flat-bottomed sailing ship cut through the South China Sea, slicing a path from what is now Guangzhou towards present-day Jakarta, once a Dutch trading port. It would never reach its intended destination. Somewhere on its journey, the vessel caught fire and sank beneath the waves, taking with it the ship’s crew and all of its precious cargo.

Almost 300 years later, in 1998, Vietnamese fishermen discovered the wreck off the Ca Mau Peninsula. From inside the ship’s troves, more than 130,000 pieces of porcelain were retrieved, including a porcelain flower pot transformed by the sea, known as Sea Sculpture. Glazed cobalt blue plants reach around the curve of white porcelain, and shells and clams encrusted over the pot seem to bloom from its opening, making their homes inside nine attached broken bowls. The makers, the caption will tell you, are now unknown. 

Senior art major Sadie Burke ’25 leads a discussion on the artwork in early October, inviting peers to partake in a visual analysis exercise. They ask seemingly simple questions: What is it? Who made it? When? What feelings does it evoke? But the answers are complex, complicated by the object’s connection to the natural world, and to disaster. Students offer an alternative to the sculpture’s maker being unknown: they say, rather, the art can be credited to both humankind and nature, working together to create something uniquely and unintentionally beautiful. One student says you can’t see where the sea life ends and the porcelain begins. What was once a common porcelain flower pot has become an example of the art shipwrecks can create and the ways the ocean becomes an archive, for lost things, for wrecked things, for things that, when found, can tell us stories that would have otherwise faded into obscurity. 

On a field trip to the Oregon coast, the class examines some of these stories up close, joined by Wagner-McCoy’s English 341 class, who are also engaging with 19th-century sea travel, imperialist expansion, and extractive capitalism in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Sud says it’s important for her own students to be physically present with the ocean to better understand it. Before their trip, in an earlier class discussion, Anahi Sanchez ’25 asks her peers to consider their sea experiences. What connections do they have to the ocean, if any at all? What does it mean to them? For Anahi, who grew up in the small coastal town of Ixtapa, Mexico, her relationship to the sea was “very much a special one.” Some of her peers grew up along the coast, too, associating the ocean with recreation. Others, from landlocked places, haven’t spent much time, if any at all, near the ocean. That changes when they visit the coastal town of Tillamook. There, students from both Sud and Wagner-McCoy’s courses exchange readings and ideas, and find that they’re learning many of the same things, but from different perspectives. As the fog rolls across the expanse of Tillamook Bay, they explore the nearby Octopus Tree and attempt whale watching. Later, at the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum, they analyze objects saved from the Spanish galleon shipwreck Santo Cristo de Burgos. A hunk of beeswax and tiny porcelain arrowheads sit in glass boxes, calling to mind history shaped by the dangers of seafaring. 

There’s an intrinsic uncertainty to journeys. In the Performing Arts Building one day in early October, Sarah’s Moby Dick students demonstrate this idea. They meet for a special session affectionately called the “Passage Party” to celebrate their completion of the novel, and Sarah pulls up a map of the Reed campus on the whiteboard, inviting the class to draw their paths to the PAB that day. When everyone’s finished, and Sarah has turned off the projector, what’s left on the whiteboard is a complete mishmash of green, pink, blue, and black pathways, starting in different places, making different turns and pit stops, but ending in the same place. A guest of the class, environmental journalist Michelle Nijhuis ’96, points out that the Reed canyon wasn’t always connected to the ocean as it is now. Today, the canyon feeds into the Willamette River, which feeds into the Columbia River, which feeds into the Pacific Ocean, connecting campus to the sea. “This is a quiet but powerful change,” Michelle says. She’s drawn her own long journey on the board from White Salmon, Washington, marking her trip across the Columbia down south to Reed. She ran into traffic on the way, an unexpected obstacle. The exercise shows the unpredictability of journeys, a central theme of Moby Dick, and of sea travel.

In the early modern period, unpredictability went hand in hand with seafaring. The Santo Cristo de Burgos, like the Ca Mau shipwreck, arrived at an unintended destination. The ship was originally headed for Acapulco, Mexico, in the late 17th century, but wrecked, possibly in a storm, and was rediscovered on the coast of Astoria, Oregon, in 2013. Known as the Beeswax Wreck, the ship had been hauling porcelain, pottery, and valuable wax. As early as 1813, the wreck and its wax were recorded. The Clatsop tribe was said to have used the beeswax for trade, and shaped the broken pieces of porcelain into arrowheads. These shipwreck treasures transformed in both value and purpose: wax became currency, and porcelain became weaponry. The tragic ends brought on by shipwreck created new beginnings for the objects they carried, and students find that the sea does not only hold history in its depths, but the sea itself is history. And it has many tales to tell.

Sacred Water

In the “Isarda” edition of the Bhagavata Purana, an ink and opaque watercolor painting, the Hindu deity Krishna enters the blue, rushing waters of the Yamuna River, followed by his devotees (see p. 28). They sweep past the landscape of Braj, the homeland of Krishna and, today, a pilgrimage center in north India, gliding past trees and grazing animals, the water flowing beyond the confines of the paper. Water in Braj at this time was seen as simultaneously life-threatening and lifesaving, a central narrative to these artworks, art historian Sugata Ray says. In Hindu mythology, Krishna shelters Braj from rain that may flood the riverbanks, while the water of Yamuna also sustains the agricultural and pastoral communities of the area.

When it was estimated to have been painted, a period known as the Little Ice Age was affecting the planet. As Ray points out, the name of the event itself has been colonized, representing the experiences of those in North America and Europe, who encountered extreme cold at the time. Other parts of the world, however, like India and Africa, endured an abnormally high occurrence of the warm phase of El Niño, causing failed monsoon seasons and resulting in drought. Why then, Sud asks students, did artists from the regional courts of India paint poetic visions of rains, lakes, and rivers during this time?

In an earlier Bhagavata Purana, “Palam,” the Yamuna River serves as a flat decorative background as Krishna and his devotees dance across the scene. In “Isarda,” however, the river takes center stage, marking a significant change in feelings toward Yamuna in the short span of 30 years. Comparing these works encourages the class to consider: Was the change in feelings toward Yamuna caused by the very absence of water over the course of that period? 

Another water-related change in Braj was architectural. The Sati Burj, a red sandstone tower, included a viewing portal. At one time, such windows were used to view the emperor, who was considered divine. In Hinduism, this act was considered “darshan,” or the act of viewing a deity or divine person. Eventually, the portal came to be a means of viewing the Yamuna River instead. Sud explains to the class that with this change, people began “doing darshan” to the river, viewing the river in the same manner in which they would pay homage to a god or a divinely ordained emperor. Hindu scripture says, after all, that “Yamuna purifies one who beholds it.” Beholding the river became a multisensorial experience, stretching past sight into smell and sound. Water, in its scarcity during the drought, expanded beyond the environment, Ray says, into the theological and the aesthetic.

In the 18th century, the rulers of Udaipur, the capital of the Mewar Kingdom in western India, reimagined courtly spaces as a medium for sensory experience and symbolic power by shifting palaces from being on land to being on lakes. Such structures, like the famous Jagniwas Palace on Lake Pichola, served as hubs for leisure, festivities, and diplomatic encounters. Lake palaces combined pleasure with politics and blurred lines between leisure and diplomacy. Jagniwas became a “powerfully effective frame for praising the king,” art historian Dipti Khera writes. At a time of increasing drought and climate change, water, a substance inextricably tied to life and sustenance, became a way of exerting power and control. And it was not the first or last time humankind has used water as a tool for domination of a place or a people.

The Ship

There are two main institutions of modern slavery, historian Marcus Rediker writes: the plantation and the slave ship. But while the former has been studied a great deal, the latter has often been forgotten, despite its crucial role in the slave trade. Rediker refers to such ships as factories, vessels that produced labor power by helping to create the commodity of “slaves,” and subsequently forming categories of race. “Essential to the production of both,” Rediker writes, “was terror.” One of these tools of terror involved the sea itself, as a means of kidnapping and then stranding enslaved Africans. Enslavers, too, mobilized the ocean’s predators as additional horrors that they inflicted upon those they enslaved, specifically sharks. 

In the late 18th century, abolitionists pointed to sharks as one example of the extraordinary violence that took place on slave ships, as they relayed instances of enslavers feeding Africans to these animals on the transatlantic journey. The destruction of slave corpses by sharks was a public spectacle and part of the degradation of enslavement, Rediker explains. A famous work by romantic painter J. M. W. Turner provides a visual of the connection between slave ships, sharks, and the terror enslaved Black people endured on trips across the Atlantic. The slave ship he captures is unnamed, allowing it to stand, academic Christina Sharpe writes, “for every slave ship and every slave crew, for every slave ship and all the murdered Africans in Middle Passage.” It could have been the Zong, a slave ship on a journey to Jamaica in 1781 which filled its holds with 442 abducted Africans, twice the amount they knew the vessel could carry. The ship overshot its destination, and its crew reported that they decided to kill some of the enslaved by dropping them from the Zong to “save the rest of the cargo.” The British public learned of this, as Sharpe recounts, when the ship’s owners sued the underwriters for the insurance value of those murdered Africans. The story of the Zong comes through in Turner’s painting, though the ship depicted is unnamed. In Sud’s class, students discuss how the Zong and stories like it display another kind of violence within the slave trade, off land and made possible by sea travel, centered around the dehumanization of Africans through tools of terror like sharks and the ocean itself. 

Students learn in Sud’s course that the connections between water and racism didn’t end with the institution of slavery. Climate change too has become a manifestation of racism, specifically environmental racism, particularly against Black populations. When Hurricane Katrina, the severity of which is thought to be due in part to climate change, hit in 2005, the low-income Black communities of New Orleans were hit the hardest. In Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, which Sud’s students watch, Black interviewees consistently connect the experience of Katrina to slavery. One resident, Gina Montana, says being forcibly bused out of town to an unknown destination roused “an ancient memory” of being enslaved. Another resident, Fred Johnson, says he and his friends believe Katrina was a sign that the spirits of the Africans who died in the Middle Passage were dissatisfied with the conditions forced upon their descendants in New Orleans. Here, again, art shows that water has been used as a tool to subjugate a population, now through the means of climate change.

The Aestheticization of Destruction

In 1855, when asked to sign a treaty by white settlers, a chief of the Cayuse tribe (which now shares a reservation and government with the Umatilla and Walla Walla tribes of Oregon) inquired, “I wonder if the ground has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said?” Throughout Native American history, the land has been referred to as something alive, students read in author Amitav Ghosh’s book The Nutmeg’s Curse.

White colonizers saw things differently. In a time of conquest and manifest destiny, made possible by sea travel, they saw land as an object, something to be gained for political and economic power. Ghosh refers to these processes as “wars of terraforming,” or, changing an entire landscape for the purposes of conquering and colonizing. The environment and nonhumans played a role in these biopolitical conflicts, transformed into weaponry. 

Terraforming was only the beginning of a long history in which colonizers began to act through the frame of “world-as-resource.” Instead of personifying it as a living entity with feelings and reactions, as Native Americans saw the landscape, white settlers viewed nature as a factory, something to be used and controlled. “To see the world in this way requires not just the physical subjugation of people and territory, but also a specific idea of conquest, as a process of extraction,” Ghosh writes. Once the landscape has been extracted from, and conquest thus achieved, he explains, the object begins to be seen as inert by the conqueror. The land holds no more mysteries, and the challenge of dominating it has ended. This same presumption, Ghosh speculates, is what leads billionaires today to dream of conquests to Mars. But, he writes, “what Earth is really exhausted of is not its resources; what it has lost is meaning.”

In becoming familiar with land, and with Earth, Ghosh explains, the planet is viewed as inanimate, something that does not act. But, really, we know that it does, and more and more we witness its action. Wildfires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters increase in both frequency and intensity. Plants and animals go extinct. Biodiversity disappears. Polar ice caps melt and sea levels rise. Earth responds as if alive, as if something, or someone, rather, who may have replied to the Cayuse chief, “Yes, I’m listening, and yes, I have something to say.”

This process of an extraction and its subsequent consequences appear in art through the centuries. In impressionist painter Claude Monet’s famous artwork Sunrise, a spherical red blaze rises above the horizon, shining through a blue-gray haze. Rowboats slice through slow, calm waters. In the distance, the smokestacks of pack boats and steamships stand tall above the river Seine, mere shadows through the new smog settling over France. When he painted this work in 1872, Monet couldn’t have known he wasn’t capturing only the port of Le Havre on a quiet early morning, but a key shift affecting all of Earth: the beginnings of air pollution, and thus, the inception of wide-scale, human-made climate change. The painting is hazy because France, at this time, was becoming hazy itself. Sud explains in one class how pollutants mean more aerosols, and more aerosols means less visibility and definition when viewing objects. To understand art like Monet’s, Sud explains, it’s key to understand the environment the artist was affected by and the science behind it. (As an example, journalist Carolyn Y. Johnson wrote a story in The Washington Post in December 2024 about how astrophysicists have been analyzing Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night for clues about turbulence.) Monet’s artwork is an early example of the way we aestheticize the Anthropocene, as visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff puts it, even as we destroy it.

But aestheticization of the ways our climate is changing can contribute to action, too.

On the last day of class, on a cold December morning, students analyze the photos taken of the Arctic by Indian-born American photographer Subhankar Banerjee. In the early 2000s, Banerjee set out to capture all of the seasons in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The idea was to show the space as a living, breathing ecosystem, affected by the seasons and necessary for sustaining the life of many plants and animals, rather than as a blank slate. In one photo of the east fork of the Chandalar River, the view is full of vibrant color, a stark contrast to how the Arctic is typically depicted—the picture transforms the imagined barren wasteland to a natural landscape full of life. The color evokes an emotional response, Sud’s students say, and thus a desire to save the space. The caption describes how the trees climbing up the hill are moving northward due to global warming. 

“Cast your eyes on this,” insisted Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer during a 2003 Senate debate, holding up a photograph by Banerjee of a polar bear crossing a frozen harbor. At the time, former President George W. Bush hoped to open the ANWR to oil drilling. Senator Boxer displayed the photographs in hopes of convincing her colleagues to vote in favor of an amendment to prevent the drilling. Her amendment was approved, halting plans to drill the ANWR, at least for a little while. Banerjee’s visual documentation of the Arctic assisted the landscape and the life that’s sustained there.

Water has existed as both an invisible entity in art history and as a catalytic environmental force across time, Sud explains. In Art 350, “I wanted to confront those tensions and think through what we as art historians can do when we centralize water and what this methodological maneuver can do to our discipline and modes of thinking about the world,” she says.

Senior English major Caroline Steele ’25 said of the class, “You think about how all the oceans are connected. But you don’t really think of it from a global perspective. I feel like I was very zoomed in before, and this [class] zoomed me out.”

Historian Finis Dunaway argues that we shouldn’t think of the Arctic as the “Last Frontier,” as something far removed from ourselves, but rather as a place intimately tied to the history and ecology of the modern world. That sentiment echoes across the other forms of water studied in Art 350, too.

From the Oregon coast to the South China Sea; across the Indian Ocean and through the Yamuna River; over the Atlantic and the glaciers of the Arctic, students traced the intricate ways water is entwined with human and nonhuman history. They analyzed its use in both creation and destruction. And the bodies of water they studied have all changed dramatically with time. The oceans are warming. The Yamuna River is filled with toxic pollutants. The Jagniwas, which has been turned into a hotel, stood in an expanse of dry land for a period in the 2000s due to drought. The Arctic is melting, and oil drilling is accelerating its obliteration.

Through examining art in Sud’s course, students learn how climate change isn’t only a scientific or technological challenge, but a cultural, ethical, political, and, as Sud puts it, a “profoundly human” one. One that, perhaps, can be helped by looking to our oceans, rains, rivers, and pools, and the art that’s documented them across time and place.

Tags: Academics, Courses We’d Love To Take, Environmental Humanities, Professors