Our engagement with art has fundamentally shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic. As museums and galleries shut down or severely reduced the number of visitors to contain the spread of the virus, the in-person viewing experience of art was but another halted aspect of daily life. Increasingly, the art-viewing public turned toward Instagram and other visual social media platforms. Long used by artists for networking and to reach a wider audience for their work, Instagram has emerged as a pivotal resource (especially for young artists) to connect in a time of limited in-person interaction. For graduating BFA and MFA art students, this has meant the loss of their thesis exhibition. This event is a rite of passage in one’s career, and the culmination of years of work. To alleviate this loss, Professor Benjamin Cook of the Art Academy of Cincinnati created the Instagram account @socialdistancegallery. Boasting over eighteen thousand followers, the Social Distance Gallery has hosted hundreds of BFA and MFA thesis exhibitions from institutions around the globe during the pandemic.

I never intended to devote my doctoral studies toward the environment. When I began my Ph.D. in California in 2015, my research interests pertained to questions of materiality, queerness, sexual futures, and craft. For me, the process of a dissertation continues to be an endless lesson in the art of letting go and allowing for change and the unexpected. During the summer of 2018, I embarked on a three-week research trip across the southwestern United States. At the Ceramic Research Center (CRC) on the campus of Arizona State University and the archives of the New Mexico Museum of Art, I hoped to find a few gems that would bolster my project on queer craftspeople in the American West, AIDS, and the potentiality of tactility and the surface of an object as a site for sexual expression. I found nothing. During the 937-mile drive through deserts and red rock mountains from Santa Fe to Santa Barbara, I agonized over what to tell my advisor.

Three California potters Glen Lukens (1887-1967), Hal Riegger (1911-2005), and Rick Dillingham (1952-1994) are at the forefront of art historical interventions in the extraction of the subterranean economy. Their objects, writings, and processes dig up the complex and slippery relations of ceramic vessels to settler colonialism, industrial capitalism, and the liberation of queer personhood in the United States during the twentieth century. I take up the term “geological primitivism” to examine the ways the subjects of this dissertation negotiated their relationship to extraction and the land. Their writings and philosophies reimagined the materiality of ceramics as being ahistorical. The land is not a neutral passive subject. Embedded within its materiality are cultural histories of place and violent genocide enacted under the structure of U.S. settler colonialism. The California Design exhibition series, curated by Eudorah Moore at the Pasadena Art Museum, which featured the works of Lukens, Riegger, and Heath, alongside other artists and designers further builds upon the mythologized narrative of the land of the American West as a primordial landscape ready for cultivation and the exploitation of its natural resources.