Thesis Chapters by Eleonor Botoman
Nestled in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, Storm King Art Center has served as a model for ou... more Nestled in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, Storm King Art Center has served as a model for outdoor sculpture parks across the world, attracting visitors to its 500 acres of expansive fields and rugged, forested topography. This thesis, both a research paper and a biogeographic species identification map, sets out to analyze Storm King’s past, present, and future land relations through a hybrid art historical and ecocritical interrogation of its sculpture collections, its landscaping practices, and how these curatorial and conservation strategies have shaped the park’s biodiversity. Beginning with Storm King’s founding and development from the 1960s and '90s, I use archival documents and oral histories, framed by case studies of art made by sculptors David Smith, Kenneth Snelson, and Mark di Suevro to explore the land’s pre-museum agricultural and industrial history and discuss the institution’s early landing projects for outdoor art display. I then turn to the park’s present operations to see how the site-specific and living sculptures by Maya Lin, Peter Coffin, and Chakaia Booker spurred new questions of multispecies collaboration and sustainable stewardship. Lastly, I look to Storm King’s future, using pieces by Sarah Sze, Richard Serra, and David Brooks to analyze the park’s ongoing infrastructural expansion and implementation of climate-resilient maintenance strategies to speculate on the institution’s shifting mission as environmental caretaker and curator. An accompanying biodiversity map documents the species found around these works that influence Storm King’s past, present, and future terrain. As outdoor museums confront ongoing threats of ecological crisis, this art historical biogeography of Storm King Art Center engages in transhistorical debates of institutional stewardship by entangling enduring divisions between the manmade and natural, growth and decay. This project proposes an alternative interspecies, land-based ethic of collaborative care amidst shifting ecocultural terrain.
Web Browser Friendly: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/instant/exhibit/index.html?appid=52b52ef729624bdea998304931cb05ab
Mobile Phone Map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=68604b14a41c4673a0333179f2e3cd7d
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This thesis explores how American art museums located in two of the nation's most threatened coas... more This thesis explores how American art museums located in two of the nation's most threatened coastal communities are adapting to climate change's intensification of sea level rise, extreme storms, and flooding by implementing resilient nature-based design strategies in their buildings and landscaping. The two museums compared for this analysis are the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) in South Florida and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. This comparative study begins with an overview of current professional and governmental emergency planning, disaster risk reduction, and climate resilience policy guidelines and handbooks to identify gaps and opportunities to improve these recommendations. It then discusses how PAMM's newer facilities were purpose-built for hurricane resistance, while the Chrysler Museum has incorporated flood mitigation into piecemeal renovations and expansions of its older, historic complex. I analyze architectural and landscaping plans created by their design firms, and the regional challenges each institution faces, as well as compare how these museums communicate their vulnerabilities to the public through building-focused climate education experiences and exhibition programming. Both case studies exemplify practical adaptive design strategies that are not only financially sustainable but also ensure their continued survival as cultural stewards. Despite the waters rising along America's shores, these two case studies remind us that coastal institutions-regardless of their size or age-can work with, rather than against, water to reduce their risk of washing away.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Barnard College Undergraduate Senior Thesis, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Book Reviews by Eleonor Botoman
Ecozon@, 2024
Book Review of "Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean"
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
C Magazine, 2022
For C Magazine's "Extraction" issue
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
C Magazine, 2021
My review of the science fiction novel, "George The Parasite," for C Magazine's "Community" issue
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Publications by Eleonor Botoman
Open Cultural Studies, 2024
This article explores different institutional approaches to exhibiting and maintaining living, pl... more This article explores different institutional approaches to exhibiting and maintaining living, plantbased sculptures, and installation art. By studying the creation and management of artworks by Gilberto Esparza, Michael Wang, Precious Okoyomon, and Daniel Lie, this article considers how cultural institutions can incorporate ethics of more-than-human care in their conservation practices. As each of these artworks grows, decays, and dies through differing states of institutional intervention (or lack thereof), their provocative experiments through the themes and aesthetics of queer ecology, vegetal technoscience, and botanical decolonization invite museum staff and visitors alike into biodynamic, multisensory engagements with multispecies collaboration that turn the white cube into soil and green.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
BlackFlash Magazine, 2024
A featured essay in BlackFlash Magazine's "Archival" issue on the history of biodiversity archive... more A featured essay in BlackFlash Magazine's "Archival" issue on the history of biodiversity archives and a survey of creative interventions in how we memorialize mass extinction.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Long Now Foundation, 2022
If we leave the mangroves to grow in their own time, rather than having to endure and be stunted ... more If we leave the mangroves to grow in their own time, rather than having to endure and be stunted by the pressures of our own, what stories could they tell us?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
CURSOR Magazine, 2022
For CURSOR Magazine's inaugural issue
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Public Services Quarterly , 2022
"Special Libraries, Special Challenges" is a column dedicated to exploring the unique public serv... more "Special Libraries, Special Challenges" is a column dedicated to exploring the unique public services challenges that arise in libraries that specialize in a particular subject, such as law, medicine, business, and so forth. In each column, the author will discuss public service dilemmas and solutions that arise specifically in special libraries.
This article is written by Eleonor (Ellie) Botoman. Ellie is a poet-critic based in New York City. She currently works in PR at Elle Communications and previously worked as library coordinator at Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Archive. In this article, Ellie details the history, collection scope, challenges, and adaptations the Sketchbook Archive has undergone during its history, both before and during the COVID pandemic.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Double Exposure, 2018
Coupled with threats from a violent stalker who is upset by her decision to leave her innocent po... more Coupled with threats from a violent stalker who is upset by her decision to leave her innocent pop idol life in favor of a darker role on a crime television show, Mima’s sense of identity begins to fracture. As people involved in the show’s production are found murdered, Mima begins to question her own innocence, no longer able to keep track of which reality she is in. The boundaries between the digital and the everyday spill into each other. 20 years later, Kon’s film feels prophetic. While the Internet at the time was viewed as this utopian, egalitarian network of communication and information, Kon exposes this new technology’s sinister potential long before we, as a society, came to understand the negatives of social media, the possibility of monstrous identity formation as we increasingly disengage with the real world in favor of a digital artifice.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Interiors Journal, 2016
With its unflinching violence and vividly rendered animations, Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyberpunk anime,... more With its unflinching violence and vividly rendered animations, Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyberpunk anime, Akira (1988), is an iconic cult classic. Decades after its release, this film has inspired musicians like Michael Jackson and Kanye West as well as other major Sci-Fi franchises like The Matrix (1999). While Akira continues to be praised for its richly detailed visuals and intense dystopian narrative, we shouldn’t forget the Japanese historical (and architectural) context from which so much of the film’s design comes from. In the early 1960’s, a new architectural movement was forged within post-war Japan. Faced with the wide-scale destruction of numerous cities, a small group of architects (Kenzo Tange, Fumihiko Maki, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Arata Isozaki just to name a few) began to maximize and re-design the urban landscape into one of growing, modular megastructures inspired by the smallest processes of life.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Art Criticism, 2016
The grotesque finds power in ugly subtleties. Its terrifying nature can be found in mere suggesti... more The grotesque finds power in ugly subtleties. Its terrifying nature can be found in mere suggestions as well as in explicit images that make our skin crawl or turn our heads away from the screen. Certain feminists use these subtleties of the grotesque to discuss how the pressures of conventional beauty have affected the female experience, in the way women are perceived and how they perceive themselves, and how a rejection of those standards through the unlovely can become a kind of reclamation for some women.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Exhibition Reviews by Eleonor Botoman
The Brooklyn Rail, 2024
Review of Fernando Palma Rodríguez's solo exhibition at Canal Projects for The Brooklyn Rail's Ju... more Review of Fernando Palma Rodríguez's solo exhibition at Canal Projects for The Brooklyn Rail's July/August 2024 issue
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Artforum, 2019
Ricardo Brey's exhibition here, "Doble Existencia / Double Existence," bridges the gulf between l... more Ricardo Brey's exhibition here, "Doble Existencia / Double Existence," bridges the gulf between language and materials through a kind of alchemical hybridity.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Artforum, 2018
For Hikaru Fujii's first solo exhibition in the US, the ISCP resident focuses on the excavation o... more For Hikaru Fujii's first solo exhibition in the US, the ISCP resident focuses on the excavation of a mass grave in Athens from the seventh century BCE, which may be linked to the Cylonian Affair-a failed coup led by one of the city's aristocrats, Cylon, which ultimately led to the development of Athenian democracy-through "research-choreography," a synthesis of dance, filmmaking, and scientific research.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Academic Papers by Eleonor Botoman
For Museum Management class
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
For Rot class
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
For Museum History & Theory Class
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Thesis Chapters by Eleonor Botoman
Web Browser Friendly: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/instant/exhibit/index.html?appid=52b52ef729624bdea998304931cb05ab
Mobile Phone Map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=68604b14a41c4673a0333179f2e3cd7d
Book Reviews by Eleonor Botoman
Publications by Eleonor Botoman
This article is written by Eleonor (Ellie) Botoman. Ellie is a poet-critic based in New York City. She currently works in PR at Elle Communications and previously worked as library coordinator at Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Archive. In this article, Ellie details the history, collection scope, challenges, and adaptations the Sketchbook Archive has undergone during its history, both before and during the COVID pandemic.
Exhibition Reviews by Eleonor Botoman
Academic Papers by Eleonor Botoman
Web Browser Friendly: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/instant/exhibit/index.html?appid=52b52ef729624bdea998304931cb05ab
Mobile Phone Map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=68604b14a41c4673a0333179f2e3cd7d
This article is written by Eleonor (Ellie) Botoman. Ellie is a poet-critic based in New York City. She currently works in PR at Elle Communications and previously worked as library coordinator at Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Archive. In this article, Ellie details the history, collection scope, challenges, and adaptations the Sketchbook Archive has undergone during its history, both before and during the COVID pandemic.
This intersection between plastics and contemporary environmental art plays out not only on the material itself, but the very color of the material.