Jar decorated with Avanyu (water serpent),

1919–20

The materials used to make art themselves have stories to tell. From their origins to the way they were extracted or processed, all materials raise questions about the environmental impacts, and perhaps the human cost, of their use and production. Jackson’s marble sculpture depicts a fanciful woodland fairy, yet the materials and processes used to create it impacted ecological systems. The statue was created through an industrial procedure in which anonymous carvers, working under the artist’s direction, created copies from Italian marble; their gleaming finished surfaces concealed an environmentally and socially destructive infrastructure of quarrying and backbreaking labor. Similarly, Bierstadt’s and Watkins’s portrayals of Yosemite’s natural splendor involved a variety of harmful paints and substances—including toxic chemicals and lead—belying the purity of nature depicted in their images. By contrast, the Indigenous potter Martinez routinely requested spiritual permission to gather the clay from which her wares were made, considering herself in a symbiotic relationship with the renewable and naturally harvested materials she used. Miyauchi’s use of ordinary domestic cloth in place of canvas for his painting, created in a World War II Japanese internment camp, is revealing of material concerns in a different way. With traditional resources for artmaking unavailable to him, Miyauchi resorted to those at hand in his temporary environment of privation and enforced detention.