Julia Lum

Traditionally marginalized in histories of art, the Pacific has long been the site of cultural resistance to colonial occupation and the forces of climate catastrophe. "Landfalls: Art Between Britain and Polynesia" tracks a shifting set of artistic and material collisions between European and Indigenous spatial frameworks, cultures of environmental management, and distinct attitudes toward land and ocean resources—from the late eighteenth century to present. Landscape artists were instrumental in promoting British naval, mercantile, and missionary expansion in Tahiti, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Hawai‘i in the wake of James Cook’s voyages (1768-1779). Through a series of historic case studies, interwoven with analyses of contemporary Indigenous interventions in the visual archive, this project repositions “landscape” at the intersection of culturally-shaped environments and the aesthetic claims of an imperial imaginary.