About
Objectified: Methods in Environmental Humanities is an exhibition featuring selections from the Joel Snyder Materials Collection and beyond. The materials and objects included in the exhibition represent a reckoning with some of the planet’s most pressing concerns, from climate change to biodiversity loss, through humanistic inquiry.
Staged in the CWAC Exhibitions space on the 2nd floor of the Cochrane-Woods Art Center during Winter Quarter 2024 in collaboration with Dr. Jessica Landau and students in the Methods in Environmental Humanities seminar offered by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU), the exhibition foregrounds an interdisciplinary lens through which the contributors approach the environmental humanities. Students interrogate how humanistic disciplines such as art history, Indigenous studies, animal studies, comparative literature, and history serve as emerging methods through which we might understand the environment. Collectively, the student curators contemplate our everyday relationships with the built environment, natural resources, and stolen land through humanistic lines of inquiry.
To demonstrate how an interpretation can change depending on the methodological approach used or theoretical lens applied to an object, student curators were asked to produce two distinct labels using at least two different methodologies. To read both labels, as well as student explanations of their methodological approaches, click on an image from the exhibition.
Objectified: Methods in Environmental Humanities is co-curated by Dr. Jessica Landau and student curators from her Winter 2024 Methods in the Environmental Humanities seminar: Yufei Chen (AB’26, Comparative Literature), Jess Senger (AB’24, Environmental Science [major] & Environmental and Urban Studies [minor]), Damary Alvarez (AB’25, Global Studies & Human Rights), Jack McDonald (AB’25, Public Policy & Environmental Science), Mariana Reed (AB’26, Environment, Geography and Urbanization [major] & Education [minor]), Justin Daab (Fellow, Leadership & Society Initiative), and Owen Castle (AB’25, Math & Environmental and Urban Studies).
About
Objectified: Methods in Environmental Humanities is an exhibition featuring selections from the Joel Snyder Materials Collection and beyond. The materials and objects included in the exhibition represent a reckoning with some of the planet’s most pressing concerns, from climate change to biodiversity loss, through humanistic inquiry.
Staged in the CWAC Exhibitions space on the 2nd floor of the Cochrane-Woods Art Center during Winter Quarter 2024 in collaboration with Dr. Jessica Landau and students in the Methods in Environmental Humanities seminar offered by the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU), the exhibition foregrounds an interdisciplinary lens through which the contributors approach the environmental humanities. Students interrogate how humanistic disciplines such as art history, Indigenous studies, animal studies, comparative literature, and history serve as emerging methods through which we might understand the environment. Collectively, the student curators contemplate our everyday relationships with the built environment, natural resources, and stolen land through humanistic lines of inquiry.
To demonstrate how an interpretation can change depending on the methodological approach used or theoretical lens applied to an object, student curators were asked to produce two distinct labels using at least two different methodologies. To read both labels, as well as student explanations of their methodological approaches, click on an image from the exhibition.
Objectified: Methods in Environmental Humanities is co-curated by Dr. Jessica Landau and student curators from her Winter 2024 Methods in the Environmental Humanities seminar: Yufei Chen (AB’26, Comparative Literature), Jess Senger (AB’24, Environmental Science [major] & Environmental and Urban Studies [minor]), Damary Alvarez (AB’25, Global Studies & Human Rights), Jack McDonald (AB’25, Public Policy & Environmental Science), Mariana Reed (AB’26, Environment, Geography and Urbanization [major] & Education [minor]), Justin Daab (Fellow, Leadership & Society Initiative), and Owen Castle (AB’25, Math & Environmental and Urban Studies).
“The “steam cars” were noisy and slow, fifty years ago. Now America moves fast… because of steel. On rails, on highways, on water, and in the sky… Inland speeds transportation.”
Curator: Owen Castle (AB’25, Math & Environmental and Urban Studies)
Label One
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Paul Gerding
American artist, 1895–1983
50 Years of Inland Steel, 1943
from 50 Years of Inland Steel, 1893–1943, Regenstein Library
HD9519.I5A3 1943
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In 1943, Inland Steel recorded its highest output.1 Inland was founded in 1893 with a small investment in old steel rolling machinery and quickly grew.2 After facing losses at the beginning of the depression, the company began to consolidate—buying iron mines in Hibbing, MN, limestone quarries in Manistique, MI, and coal mines in Wheelwright, KY.3 The company bought a fleet of lake freighters to haul ore and limestone;4 they also built more rolling mills, open hearth furnaces, and blast furnaces—one is visible above the clouds, looking over its subjects.5
Before World War II, 19.8% of Inalnd’s sales went to the automotive industry, 11% to the railroads, and 18.4% to construction.6 Each element is represented futuristically, in line with the hope for post-war prosperity. When the US entered the war, Inland directed all production to defense—51 company records were broken to produce boats, tanks, shells, guns, and bombs.7 Following the despair of the Depression, this image shows the hope for unlimited prosperity, growth, and freedom inseparable from extraction and production. Inland Steel dissolved in 1998; their Indiana Harbor mill is still visible if you look South along the lakeshore from Chicago.
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1. Inland Steel Company. Annual Report .. [Chicago, 1943].
2. Perry, W. A. A History of Inland Steel Company and the Indiana Harbor Works. [S.l.: s.n., 1980].
3. Inland Steel Company. Annual Report .. [Chicago, 1923 – 1943].
4. Inland Steel Company. Annual Report .. [Chicago, 1936].
5. Inland Steel Company. Annual Report .. [Chicago, 1923–1943].
6. Inland Steel Company. Annual Report .. [Chicago, 1940].
7. Inland Steel Company. Annual Report .. [Chicago, 1942].
Label Two
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Paul Gerding
American artist, 1895–1983
50 Years of Inland Steel, 1943
from 50 Years of Inland Steel, 1893–1943, Regenstein Library
HD9519.I5A3 1943
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When Inland Steel celebrated its 50th anniversary, it commissioned a book that gloriously told the company’s history which contains the displayed painting. Commissioned by Inland’s board, and painted by an artist who specialized in advertisements, this image depicts the growth, prosperity, and freedom enabled by steel.8 It emphasizes the products of steel production—cars, boats, trains, bridges, and planes—with the point of production presented God-like above the clouds.
The United Steelworkers of America was only recognized by Inalnd the previous year in 1942.9 This came after a 5-year battle between the union and management who ignored orders from the National Labor Relations Board to bargain.10 In 1937, the steelworkers went on strike for months; during the strike, four local 1010 members—representing some of Inland’s steelworkers—were murdered by the Chicago police for striking in the Memorial Day Massacre.11 In the 1944 Unites Steelworkers constitutional convention, local 1010 complained about the poor wages offered by Inland and hazardous working conditions; they advocated for the 24-point bargaining program which argued for higher wages, job security, pension funds, sick leave, vacation, and a 30-hour work week.12 The toil of the steelworkers is left out of the painting entirely.
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8. Donald Pittenger, “Paul Gerding, Automotive Advertising Illustrator,” Art Contrarian, Blogspot, 2023, https://artcontrarian.blogspot.com/2023/08/paul-gerding-automobile-advertising.html.
9. Inland Steel Company. Annual Report .. [Chicago, 1942].
10. Inland Steel Company. Annual Report .. [Chicago, 1937–1942].
11. “Our Union,” United Steelworkers Local 1010, accessed Januar 27, 2024, http://www.usw1010.org/our_union.html.
12. United Steelworkers of America. Proceedings of the … Constitutional Convention. [Indianapolis].
In the first label, I use the narrative method that Cronon introduces.13 Moreover, I situate the image both in the history of the company, the United States, and the natural resource flows that are required to produce steel. To write this narrative, I studied Inland Steel’s annual reports from 1923 – 1943, and I created a dataset in which I digitized their balance sheets; I analyzed the company’s balance sheets, similar to Dosch’s method of applying scientific methods to the archive, but I don’t think I had the space nor the data to fully develop this analysis.14 In the second label, I apply rendering to explain the painting.15 I want to show how this is a rendering from the board’s perspective and occludes key details of Inland’s history – specifically the labor struggle at their mills. The double entendre still applies here because the rendering was commissioned by the board with profits they held – their profits are sort of “rendered” to make this painting. (I understand the double entendre doesn’t work perfectly here, but it still is helpful as a tool to understand the painting.) Moreover, a more formal comparative analysis is applied; putting the epistemologies of steel the board embedded in this painting in dialog with the epistemologies held by the union admits a more complex understanding of the so-called “postwar prosperity”. I tried to create labels that would point the viewer in particular interpretive directions but tried to give them plenty of room to reach their own conclusions about the meaning of the image.
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13. Cronon, William. 1992. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative.” The Journal of American History 78 (4): 1347–76. doi:10.2307/2079346.
14. Dosch, Jerald J. 2007. “On Dead Birds’ Tales: Museum Specimen Feathers as Historical Archives of Environmental Pollutants.” Environmental History 12 (3): 661–65. doi:10.1093/envhis/12.3.661.
15. Nicole Shukin. 2009. “Introduction: New Life Forms and Functions of Animal Fetishism.” In Animal Capital : Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Posthumanities. University of Minnesota Press.