“Alternate Endings”: Romanticisms, Anthropocenes, Objects Study, and Activist Art Futures

The collaborative project for this essay began with a provocation: what can Romanticism do for the public humanities? A liberal arts college professor and a then-Arts Institute Curatorial Fellow and graduate student, alongside a group of intrepid students in an undergraduate interdisciplinary seminar, built a public art exhibit of literary and visual art. The project offered a semester-long conversation about the histories of art and climate change from the Romantic period to the present, subsequently opening this conversation to other classrooms, professors, institutions, community members, and artists. Titled “Alternate Endings,” we suggest that to understand fully the public nature of the climate crisis, we must better understand past publics, including Romantic-era and nonhuman “citizens.” The Anthropocene classroom and museum offered another ending, focused on constituting Romantic environmental civic imaginations within larger communities.