Art History Speaker Series — Hunting, Ecology, and the Arts

Talk: Piniarsuaq: Marine Mammals in/as Inuit Art, 1600–1900
Speaker: Bart Pushaw, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
When: Thursday, November 6, 2025 • 12:00–1:15 PM (Mountain Standard Time / MST)
Where: Zoom https://boisestate.zoom.us/j/96966594776

This event is free and open to the public

Series Description

Hunting has long occupied a central place in art history—not only in natural history illustrations, grand paintings of human–animal combat, popular prints, and other visual media, but also as the impetus for a wide range of material culture. It produced artifacts as varied as hunting horns, trophies, horse tack, taxidermy, furniture, and fashion. As both a subject of artistic representation and a material practice, hunting offers a compelling lens through which to consider how human intervention shaped attitudes toward the environment, constructed gender roles, and reinforced social hierarchies. Images of the hunt—often defined by direct and violent incursions into nature—came to embody humanity’s presumed dominion over the natural world. To examine these works critically is to gain insight into the historical entanglement of humans and their environment, and into the role of that relationship in shaping cultural and historical identities.

About the Speaker

Dr. Bart Pushaw is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Pushaw's teaching, research, and curatorial work focus on art histories of the Circumpolar North, with emphasis on the global dimensions of the Indigenous Arctic. He deploys his research to advance rematriation campaigns of cultural heritage back to Indigenous stewardship, especially in Kalaallit Nunaat and Alaska, as well as in the Caribbean.