Emily Scott

Emily Eliza Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on art and design practices that engage pressing geo- and eco-political issues, often with the intent to actively transform real-world conditions. More broadly, she is interested in art and environmental justice, art and activism, critical approaches to the built environment, visual cultures of nature, land-based art from the 1960s-present, and the capacity of art to produce non-instrumental forms of sensing and knowing. Her writing has appeared in journals including Arts, Art Journal, Art Journal Open, American Art, Third Text, and The Avery Review as well as numerous anthologies and exhibition catalogues. She has additionally coedited three volumes, including The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (Routledge, 2021) and Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (UC Press, 2015); and, at present, is completing a monograph on contemporary art that tracks environmental violence. Since 2025, she has co-directed the UO’s internationally renowned Center for Environmental Futures. She has also been a core participant in multiple art collectives: Fuel Ladder (2022-24), World of Matter (2011-2017), and the Los Angeles Urban Rangers (2004-2017). Her scholarly and artistic work—which she sees as together contributing to the emergent, interdisciplinary field of the environmental arts and humanities—have been supported over the years by grants/awards from Creative Capital, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, College Art Association, Graham Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Luce Foundation, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Annenberg Foundation, Switzer Foundation, Nevada Museum of Art, UO Center for Environmental Futures, the Oregon Humanities Center, and Oregon State University’s PRAx. Prior to joining the UO, she was a Visiting Professor at the VU University Amsterdam and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), both after earning her PhD in contemporary (post-1945) art history, with minors in cultural geography and American art, from UCLA. Before entering academia, Scott spent nearly a decade as a National Park Service ranger in Utah and Alaska.

CURRENT PROJECTS

The Art of Earthly Evidence (monograph)

“Flashpoint: Embodying New Environmental Normals” exhibition (Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 2028); co-curated with Nina Amstutz

A Peoples Guide to Public Lands multimedia project (OSU Public Lands Collaborative Residency, 2026-28); co-created with Nicholas Brown

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

>>> Articles/Book Chapters

“Patricia Johanson’s Radical Garden Proposals (1969)—Then and Now,” Arts 15, no. 4 (April 2026)

“Geologic Intimacies,” in Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene: Pluriversal Perspectives, eds. Nathanaël Wallenhorst and Christoph Wulf (Berlin: Springer-Nature, 2026)

 “Caught in the Circuits: Jean Tinguely in Nevada, On Television,” Studies in Visual Arts and Communication vol. 12, no. 1 (June 2025)

“Alt-Institutions: A Performance in Three Acts,” in Unserious Ecocriticism: Humor, Wit, Play, and Environmental Destruction in North American Contemporary Art & Visual Culture, eds. Maria Lux and Jessica Landau (Amherst College Press, 2026), 227-238. Co-authored with Nicole Seymour, Robert Gioielli, and Jennifer Price.

"X Marks the Land," Art Journal Open (March 2022)

“The Desert in Fine Grain,” in The Invention of the American Desert, eds. Lyle Massey and James Nisbet (UC Press, 2021), 145-164. 

“Leaky Design for a Broken Present," in Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, ed. Paola Antonelli (Milano Design Triennial, 2019), 50-56.

“Decentering Land Art from the Borderlands,” Art Journal Open (April 2018)

“Archives of the Present-Future: Climate Change and Representational Breakdown,” Avery Review (May 2016)

“Infrastructure Inside Out,” in SCAPE: Toward an Urban Ecology, ed. Kate Orff (Monacelli, 2016), 186-194. 

“Feeling in the Dark: Ecology at the Edges of History,” American Art vol. 28, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 14-20.

“Desert Ends,” in Ends of the Earth: Art of the Land to 1974, eds. Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon (MoCA and Prestel, 2012), 67–85.

“Field Effects: Invisible-5's Illumination of Peripheral Geographies,” Art Journal (Winter 2010): 38-47.

>>> Edited Volumes

The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited with TJ Demos and Subhankar Banerjee (Routledge, 2021)

Viscosity: Mobilizing Materialities, edited with Ozayr Saloojee and Karen Lutsky (Univ. of Minneapolis Dept. of Architecture, 2019)

Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, edited with Kirsten Swenson (Univ. of California Press, 2015) 

SELECTED COURSES

ARH 150 Intro to Visual Culture

ARH 368 Art and Visual Cultures of Climate Change

ARH 407/507 Architecture in the Expanded Field

ARH 410/510 Land and Environmental Art

ARH 607 Geo-Aesthetics

ENVS 203 Intro to Environmental Humanities

ENVS 410/510 Unnatural Disasters

ENVS 603 Sizing Up the Anthropocene