UC Irvine

This dissertation excavates the deeply intertwined relationship between the sculpting of civic green spaces, the administration of public art, and the management of lands and peoples. Focusing on land-shaping projects completed in Seattle, Washington, during the twentieth century, this project interrogates the aesthetics and ethics that developed the city’s environmentally-focused image of place, which depends upon symbolic representations of the Indigenous cultural heritage of the region to veil ongoing colonial dispossession and the degradation of lands, waters, and forests. Considering how early twentieth-century engineers, landscape architects, and artists initially shaped and imagined the region’s distinct landscape types and how landscape restoration, remediation, and reclamation projects of the 1960s to 1970s and 1990s to 2000s contested and recuperated earlier frameworks of Seattle’s idealizing eco-aesthetics, this dissertation analyzes the city’s persistent imagination of a “sustainable” urban landscape. From early twentieth-century landscape design and the framing of a distinct Pacific Northwest aesthetics, to the blending of Seattle’s civic museums and public art projects into the city’s green spaces, the case studies of my dissertation offer insight into the ongoing interconnections and tensions between the administration of public art, environmental policies and land use, and Indigenous resistance to the eco aesthetics of settler colonialism.

Chapter I considers the drastic reshaping of Seattle’s topography alongside an analysis of the landscape design and visual culture of the city’s first international exposition of 1909. The design of the exposition reoriented the typically enclosed world’s fair layout to enfold the sublime image of Mount Rainier into the formal design of the fairgrounds. Coinciding with rhetorical battles over preservationist and conservationist approaches to natural landscapes and resources, the fair’s mountain aesthetics, I argue, reasserted settler colonial land claims by erasing Indigenous place-histories and by framing an image of Seattle’s modernizing landscape as interconnected with the uninhabited and sustainably abundant wilderness of its hinterlands. The second chapter jumps forward to the 1960s and 70s, when artists, designers, and civic agents began to contend with Seattle’s first century of land use to reimagine the role of nature within post-military and post-industrial urban landscapes. In the first case, the design and development of the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center reclaimed twenty acres of decommissioned Fort Lawton after an extended period of pan-tribal Indigenous protests and negotiations with the city government (1969-79). The second, Robert Morris’s Untitled (Johnson Pit #30, 1979), a government-funded earth sculpture designed as a public park, served to remediate a four-acre gravel pit just south of Seattle. I assert that each case resulted in a distinct lineage of reparative ecologies, with one focused on anti-colonial demands for Indigenous self-determination and the other on anti-capitalist critique. Chapter III then focuses on the art and design of Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park (2007) to examine the integration of public art, conservation, and generalized Indigenous plant knowledges in the reclamation of green space in Seattle’s downtown district. Analyzing the park’s innovative landscape design and critiquing its modernist modes of display, I identify a return to Seattle’s early twentieth-century aesthetic frameworks within contemporary approaches to urban sustainability. While the park’s place-making eco-aesthetics and modernist modes of display recuperate early twentieth-century conceptualizations of Seattle’s idealized nature, an analysis of the park’s informational placards and site-specific commissioned artworks illuminate critical counter-narratives that provide frameworks for reflection on the region’s colonial, industrial, and post-industrial histories.