Branching Out. Botanical Metaphors and Worlding Art History from the ‘Tropics’

This chapbook examines the aestheticization of plants in colonial discourses and charts visualizations of art histories that use the tree as a metaphor. In doing so, Miriam Oesterreich considers how ‘tropicalized’ tree forms have been reappropriated to portray a more ‘worlded’ art history. In the mid-twentieth century, prominent visual artists including Miguel Covarrubias, Alfred Barr, and Ad Reinhardt featured trees of art as canonizing illustrations of Western art history. Using Pablo León de la Barra’s poster Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical (2010) as a starting point Branching Out discusses works by contemporary artists from Latin America and the Caribbean to look at the subversive potential in reimagining plant images and metaphors.
Dr. Miriam Oesterreich is Professor of Design Theory/Gender Studies at the University of the Arts Berlin. She was a post-doctoral researcher in the international project Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation Innovation at the University of Heidelberg and remains an associated member. Previously, she was an Athene Young Investigator, post-doctoral fellow in Art History and Research Associate at the Department of Fashion & Aesthetics at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. For her second book, she is currently researching the global entanglements of Mexican Indigenism as an avant-garde art practice. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Freie Universität Berlin; her published dissertation analyses the staging of ‘exotic’ bodies in early pictorial advertising from 1880 to 1914. She is co-editor of the peer-reviewed open access journal Miradas: Journal for the Arts and Culture of the Américas and the Iberian Peninsula.