Wendy Red Star
Art can’t reverse climate change or restore a lost species, but it can shift how we perceive the world around us. At its most powerful, environmental art goes beyond simply depicting nature—it intervenes, reimagines, and compels us to reassess our relationship with it.
CULTURED invited a range of artists whose work engages with the nature and environment—including Anicka Yi, Sarah Meyohas, Wendy Red Star, and Alexis Rockman—to reflect on the most influential work of environmental art of the 20th and 21st centuries so far. Their selections span speculative ecosystems, light-based installations, and regenerative landworks. Some of the works chosen are poetic, others prophetic—and all have lingered in the minds of the artists who selected them.
Taken together, they offer something urgent and enduring: a call to pay attention, to live with greater intention, and to believe that even in apocalyptic times, beauty and imagination can still take root.
Wendy Red Star
Rebecca Belmore, Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother, 1991
“I first encountered Rebecca Belmore’s Speaking to Their Mother in graduate school at UCLA in 2006, and it has stayed with me ever since. As a work of environmental and land-based art, it stood out because it centered Indigenous presence and sovereignty through poetic and political means. The sculpture’s form—a massive, hand-crafted wooden megaphone—was powerful not only in scale, but in purpose. It wasn’t a tool for projecting one voice, but for inviting many, especially those from communities often unheard, to speak directly to the land.
What struck me most was the intimacy and mobility of the piece. Belmore traveled with the work, sleeping beside it in her van, bringing it to reserves and sacred places. That act—inviting people to speak their truths in their own languages, addressing the earth rather than institutions—felt revolutionary. It shifted the idea of audience and transformed protest into ceremony.
As an Apsáalooke artist, this work shaped my thinking around how objects hold presence, history, and collective voice. It affirmed that art can move through time, place, and community, grounded in care and responsibility. Speaking to Their Mother continues to influence how I think about land, legacy, and the power of ancestral dialogue in contemporary practice.”