AN OVERVIEW THE HISTORY OF ART IN E(ART)H SCIENCE: THE U.S. PERSPECTIVE

Art and science are powerful, complementary means of visualizing, understanding and communicating an understanding of our planet and our universe. Nineteenth Century landscape painters, especially those of the American Hudson River School art movement, often accompanied government–funded geologic surveys. They played a key role in helping to establish Geology as important discipline taught in American universities and as a topic of serious conversation in the parlors of the upper middle class. Today, collaboration between artists and geoscientists continues to propel our discipline forward. In this presentation, we consider how art serves as a vehicle for communicating geoscience and highlight art/science interactions that create ways of investigating geoscience problems and understanding the Earth. We present examples to illustrate (1) how art provides new channels to access geoscience information, data and results; (2) the ways in which geoscience researchers and educators in K-12 and post-secondary formal institutions are using art and science together to interest new students in geoscience, to better communicate geoscience to audiences, and in the application of visualization tools to understand data; and (3) the potential for art to provide both an emotional ‘hook’ and aesthetic message for geoscience communication to broad audiences, making make geoscience more relevant to society. Our focus on how art ‘serves’ science is inspired by a growing interest in the intersection of art and science among many scientific associations, including AAAS, AGU and the National Academy of Science, museums, and in education through the Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics (STEAM) movement. STEAM encourages the integration of the arts into STEM teaching and learning.