Ecological art
Art that engages ecological systems through environmental relationships, habitat restoration, or public participation in ecological change.
Land art: Art made in or about landscapes, often using natural materials or large-scale outdoor interventions. Ecological art inherits land art’s engagement with place while more explicitly addressing living systems.
Wheatfield—A Confrontation: Agnes Denes’s 1982 Manhattan artwork that planted a wheat field on a landfill near Wall Street. Its crop, urban site, and economic symbolism brought ecological questions into a highly visible public space.
Restoration ecology: The science and practice of assisting the recovery of degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems. Ecological artworks may use restoration goals to guide interventions and evaluate change.
1960s environmental movement: A period of expanding public activism and policy focused on pollution, conservation, and environmental protection. Its concerns helped establish the political context for environmentally engaged art.
Environmental ethics: The branch of philosophy that examines moral relationships between humans, nonhuman life, and the environment. It helps assess what ecological artworks owe to habitats, species, and affected communities.
Earthworks: Large-scale sculptural interventions made in or with the ground. Some ecological artworks reshape terrain to support restoration or alter water flow.
Time Landscape: Alan Sonfist’s 1965 proposal and later installation recreating native precolonial forest in New York City. It treats urban land as a place for ecological memory and habitat restoration.
Phytoremediation: The use of plants to remove, contain, or transform pollutants in soil or water. Plant-based artworks can make remediation processes both functional and publicly legible.
Conceptual art: Art in which ideas or procedures take precedence over the production of a conventional object. Conceptual approaches made research, documentation, and social processes viable artistic forms.
Land art and environmental impact: The environmental effects of making, maintaining, and documenting large-scale artworks in landscapes. Ecological intentions do not guarantee that an artwork avoids disturbance or resource use.