Branching Out: Botanical Metaphors and Worlding Art History from the ‘Tropics’

Oesterreich, Miriam

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Miriam Oesterreich

Branching Out

Botanical Metaphors and Worlding Art History from the ‘Tropics’

Worlding Public Cultures

Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025
Scheduled for 13 May 2025

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This chapbook examines the aestheticization of plants in colonial discourses and charts visualizations of art histories that use the tree as a metaphor. In doing so, Miriam Oesterreich considers how ‘tropicalized’ tree forms have been reappropriated to portray a more ‘worlded’ art history. In the mid-twentieth century, prominent visual artists including Miguel Covarrubias, Alfred Barr, and Ad Reinhardt featured trees of art as canonizing illustrations of Western art history. Using Pablo León de la Barra’s poster Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical (2010) as a starting point Branching Out discusses works by contemporary artists from Latin America and the Caribbean to look at the subversive potential in reimagining plant images and metaphors.

Dr. Miriam Oesterreich is Professor of Design Theory/Gender Studies at the University of the Arts Berlin. She was a post-doctoral researcher in the international project Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation Innovation at the University of Heidelberg and remains an associated member. Previously, she was an Athene Young Investigator, post-doctoral fellow in Art History and Research Associate at the Department of Fashion & Aesthetics at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. For her second book, she is currently researching the global entanglements of Mexican Indigenism as an avant-garde art practice. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Freie Universität Berlin; her published dissertation analyses the staging of ‘exotic’ bodies in early pictorial advertising from 1880 to 1914. She is co-editor of the peer-reviewed open access journal Miradas: Journal for the Arts and Culture of the Américas and the Iberian Peninsula.

Keywords: tropicalization; tree diagram; epistemologies; worlding; decolonization; Global South; art canon; colonial aesthetics; botanic; art historiography

Branching Out offers a fresh, groundbreaking perspective on the intertwined botanical and art histories that have shaped narratives of Eurocentric intellectual evolution. Miriam Oesterreich presents a counternarrative, reinterpreting the banana tree as not only a symbol of colonial exploitation but also of artistic resistance. She challenges the tree’s symbolic role in reinforcing linear, European-derived narratives of Modern art, framing the re-appropriation of the ‘tropical’ by artists of the Americas as a profound act of defiance within the emerging discourse of worlding art histories. — Dr. Joseph R. Hartman, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Part of Worlding Public Cultures

Title	Branching Out
Subtitle	Botanical Metaphors and Worlding Art History from the ‘Tropics’
Author(s)	Miriam Oesterreich
Bio(s)	Dr. Miriam Oesterreich is Professor of Design Theory/Gender Studies at the University of the Arts Berlin. She was a post-doctoral researcher in the international project Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation Innovation at the University of Heidelberg and remains an associated member. Previously, she was an Athene Young Investigator, post-doctoral fellow in Art History and Research Associate at the Department of Fashion & Aesthetics at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. For her second book, she is currently researching the global entanglements of Mexican Indigenism as an avant-garde art practice. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Freie Universität Berlin; her published dissertation analyses the staging of ‘exotic’ bodies in early pictorial advertising from 1880 to 1914. She is co-editor of the peer-reviewed open access journal Miradas: Journal for the Arts and Culture of the Américas and the Iberian Peninsula.
Identifier	https://doi.org/10.37050/wpc-ca-05
Description	This chapbook examines the aestheticization of plants in colonial discourses and charts visualizations of art histories that use the tree as a metaphor. In doing so, Miriam Oesterreich considers how ‘tropicalized’ tree forms have been reappropriated to portray a more ‘worlded’ art history. In the mid-twentieth century, prominent visual artists including Miguel Covarrubias, Alfred Barr, and Ad Reinhardt featured trees of art as canonizing illustrations of Western art history. Using Pablo León de la Barra’s poster Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical (2010) as a starting point Branching Out discusses works by contemporary artists from Latin America and the Caribbean to look at the subversive potential in reimagining plant images and metaphors.
Is Part Of	Worlding Public Cultures
Place	Berlin
Publisher	ICI Berlin Press
Date	13 May 2025
Subject	tropicalization tree diagram epistemologies worlding decolonization Global South art canon colonial aesthetics botanic art historiography
Rights	© by the author(s) Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Language	en-GB
number of pages	v, 82
Table Of Contents	Diagrama Tropical Tropicality in the Arts and Visual Culture Visual Histories of Evolution Family Trees of Art Tropicalizing the Tree of Art: ‘Worlding’ Practices A Subversive Re-thinking of Art History through Tropicality References
has manifestation	ISBN 978-3-96558-073-2 \| Paperback \| 12 EUR \| v, 82 pp. \| 16 colour images \| 17.8 cm x 12.7 cm ISBN 978-3-96558-074-9 \| PDF \| Open Access \| 16 colour images \| 16 MB ISBN 978-3-96558-075-6 \| EPUB \| Open Access \| 16 colour images \| 17 MB

Publication scheduled for 13 May 2025

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Cite as: Miriam Oesterreich, Branching Out: Botanical Metaphors and Worlding Art History from the ‘Tropics’, Worlding Public Cultures (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025) <https://doi.org/10.37050/wpc-ca-05>