Levan Guest Lecture: Claire Farago, Writing Borderless Histories of Art

Wednesday, November 5, 2025

Claire Farago (Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder) gave a talk related to her new book, Writing Borderless Histories of Art: Human Exceptionalism and the Climate Crisis (Routledge, 2025). Organized n partnership with the Levan Environmental Humanities Working Group, the Department of Art History, the Visual Studies Research Institute, the Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability, and the EMSI Visual and Material Culture Seminar. Moderated by Daniela Bleichmar.

About the book: Writing Borderless Histories of Art is an aspirational, historical, and critical project that offers a fundamental rethinking of the relationship of humans to the rest of nature.

Social justice, Indigeneity, abuses of power, and the environmental crisis are the burning issues of today. A transcultural approach calls for abandoning structures of domination that are built into the academic disciplines, regardless of the scale or extent of interpretation. Drawing upon writings from a wide range of fields, Claire Farago argues that Art History can play a role in advancing the public's interconnectedness with the planetary life-support system that so urgently needs to be restored. Studying the discourse on art at the intersection of global capitalism, environmental degradation, and human subjection over four centuries, Writing Borderless Histories of Art advocates ontologies that do not distinguish between the sentience of humans and other animals and go beyond the dualistic metaphysics of the nature/culture divide.

While this book is addressed to a wide audience, its multilayered approach also reaches out to art historians for whom chronology, canons, and style are structures fundamental to the organization and operation of the discipline. The book is neither a history of ideas nor a search for the origins of art history, but a recognition of the structures that drive its narratives.

About the Author: Claire Farago is Professor Emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder, currently living in Los Angeles. She has written extensively on processes of transculturation, the epistemological foundations of art history, art theory, and museums. Her anthology, Reframing the Renaissance (1995) was a groundbreaking contribution to transcultural studies in art history.