Gallery Talk with Exhibition Curator, James Nisbet, Ph.D.

This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Habitat: Making the California Environment, on view September 20, 2025 through January 10, 2026.

Join the exhibition's curator, James Nisbet, Ph.D., for an opening-day walkthrough of Habitat: Making the California Environment. The exhibition considers landscape painting from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a visual record of California’s ecological history—after European contact but before the dramatic environmental changes brought by urban expansion.

Following the program, Nisbet will be available in the gallery to speak with visitors and answer questions.

This program is free and open to all. Advance registration is not required.
Gallery stools are available in the museum. Please email imca@uci.edu with questions or requests for accommodations.

About the speaker:

James Nisbet, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and the Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine, as well as Director of the Environmental Humanities Research Center. A leading scholar in ecocritical art history, his research focuses on the relationship between art, landscape, and environmental change from late modernism to the present. His recent publications include Second Site (Princeton University Press, 2021) and The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment (University of California Press, 2021), co-edited with Lyle Massey.