January 26, 2026
On Friday, January 16, 2026, the Yale Center for British Art welcomed a group of 15 graduate students affiliated with Yale Environmental Humanities and Professor Paul Sabin’s Topics in the Environmental Humanities workshop for a behind-the-scenes visit with members of the museum’s Research, Operations, Public Engagement, and Paintings and Sculpture departments. The event offered graduate students from across disciplines—including History of Art, Anthropology, History of Science and Medicine, Architecture, History, American Studies, and Italian Studies—the opportunity to learn more about visual archives and museum practice.
The morning began with a discussion led by Jan Drojarski, Capital Projects Specialist, about the YCBA’s architecture and construction materials. The building was designed by the internationally acclaimed American architect Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974) to house Paul Mellon’s (Yale College, Class of 1929; 1907–1999) extraordinary gift to Yale University. Located across the street from Kahn’s first major commission, the Yale University Art Gallery (opened in 1953), the YCBA was Kahn’s final building and was completed after his death, opening to the public on April 19, 1977. It was one of the first museum buildings in the United States to integrate commercial retail spaces into its design. In addition to the building and the collection it houses, the YCBA is historically significant for its high degree of architectural intactness and its unique relationship to the city of New Haven. According to Drojarski, the building itself is “the largest and most complex work of art in the collection.”
During the recent renovation campaign, the Operations department paid particular attention to the building’s embodied carbon—greenhouse gas emissions associated with the materials and construction processes of a building and its lifecycle—by adopting principles of reuse. During the replacement of the Center’s linen-covered gallery walls, Drojarski even saved the original linen, which he later processed into pulp for paper. Likewise, replacement skylights will reduce the building’s operational carbon by increasing its energy efficiency. Drojarski provided an overview of Kahn’s choices for construction materials, connecting these choices to both local and global networks of resource extraction.
Following Drojarski’s presentation, the group met in the galleries for a conversation with Edward Town, Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, about the formation of Paul Mellon’s collection and the works of the English landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837). Town reminded visitors that the YCBA houses the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom, and provided a thorough overview of Mellon’s anglophone collecting interests and his relationship with Yale’s humanities programs. He led the group in a discussion around several Constable cloud studies. “The two men [Constable and Mellon] shared a desire to retreat from the metropole,” Town remarked. He observed that viewing these atmospheric sky studies in “a building that communicates so clearly with the sky” is a special experience. For Town, “life channels through the windows here.”
Constable’s practice of “skying,” or looking directly up at the sky for subject matter for his painting studies, may be rooted in his and his family’s attempts to escape the negative effects of London’s coal fires and smog by traveling to the countryside. Town stated that Constable was very aware of contemporary scientific literature, especially Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modification of Clouds (1803), which influenced the artist’s notational records of cloud taxonomy, precise dates and times, wind direction, and other weather conditions.
For Town, Constable’s attempt to make art a science is full of contradictions, as clouds and atmosphere are the chief instruments of emotion in his chiaroscuro of nature. The artist demonstrated a personal interest in the emotional resonances of a landscape after rainfall. “Constable was a fair-weather painter,” Town observed. “He liked ‘skying’ right after the rain, when blades of grass glow and shine. He’s doing cloud studies every morning, weather permitting, and then building up an encyclopedia of the sky, so to speak.” Town concluded his presentation by commenting on the collection’s ability to invite unending questions about observation and close looking: how does something objective and scientific translate into the subjective experience of emotion and art? What is Constable painting, and what is he choosing to omit?
To conclude the morning’s session, the group visited the YCBA Study Room, where they engaged in a rich discussion about ways to research and teach with the Center’s visual archives. Continuing conversations about art and environmental study, Jackson Davidow, Project Manager of Public Engagement, led a hands-on discussion about landscape photographs and their relationship to prescient political issues. He noted that Constable passed away only two years before Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) first publicly announced an invention that would heighten debates about the relationship between art and science: photography.
Using this debate as a starting point, Davidow led a conversation about the borders of genres—such as documentary photography and landscape photography—and invited reflection on how images actively challenge those boundaries. He led an exercise in close looking around a series of images depicting the plantation as a site of violence, labor, and colonial science. Davidow concluded his discussion by encouraging students to consider participating in the YCBA’s upcoming workshops on teaching with objects and archival collections. Overall, each presentation sparked meaningful conversations about the myriad ways in which the Center’s staff members are engaging with issues and themes that scholars in the Environmental Humanities are also grappling with in their research across disciplines.
This visit was led by Christina Ferando, Head of Research, and Susie Beckham, Postdoctoral Research Associate (Research), with assistance from Hannah Kinney, Head of Education, and Emily Weirich, Head of the Study Room, and was organized by Yale Environmental Humanities Faculty Director Paul Sabin and Graduate Coordinator Colton Klein. The conversations sparked during the visit continued in Professor Sabin’s Topics in the Environmental Humanities workshop in a session titled “Working with the Visual Archive.” The class discussed some of the challenges and opportunities of working with one image or a set of images in research across disciplines. Students were encouraged to share and describe the images with which they are currently working and invited to reflect on how visual materials figure in their own scholarly efforts.