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Global movements of animal-and-plant based commodities have long been situated amid networks of colonized exploitation that began with the Columbian Exchange. As Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore write in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017), narratives of capitalist overconsumption of “cheap nature” harnessed naive faith in modernity to an accelerating extraction of monetary value from “natural resources.” From the late 15^th to the mid 20^th century, as the commons diminished and awareness grew of the loss of species on the land, in the sea and in the air, new forms of visual and material culture explored the mounting cost of expending seemingly inexhaustible natural materials. Alongside and entangled with the "slow violence" (Nixon, 2011) enacted by colonizers against indigenous populations, the depletion of extra-human natures was devastatingly short-sighted.

This panel aims to unsettle the comfort with which art history has trafficked in the “cheap” natural products that were hunted, harvested, circulated and recombined in the modern era. We seek papers that trace evidence of exploitative inter-species relations; ones that examine the intertwined aesthetic, and cultural networks of resource exhaustion; or ones that show how image-and-object makers registered the consequences of extinction.

Papers might consider settler colonialist land clearances, deforestation, agro-ecologies and Capitalocene frontiers, the production of ecological knowledge in the face of monetized nature, visualizations of migration, decimation, dispossession, and displacement of human and other-than human entities or the politics of “invasive” species.