“Horace Pippin and the Historical Medium of Wood”
Susan Scott Parrish (University of Michigan)
Friday, February 13, 2026
10 a.m.12 p.m.
Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
In this talk, Parrish will focus upon Horace Pippin (1888-1946), a self-taught modernist painter and “pyrographer” who incorporated the wood grain from board supports into a number of his most significant paintings. A decorated veteran from the French campaign of World War One who witnessed extensive forest destruction in France, Pippin first depicted on paper the intertwined precarity of life and of woodlands under modern warfare. Working in Pennsylvania as an artist after the war, Pippin turned to wood as his signal medium to represent plantation and abolitionist history, Black outdoors recreation and indoors family life. The wood boards hewn out of trees but still bearing the trees’ own histories in their grain, became for him the means of visually articulating other histories: of creatures, and families, and nations. I will set this analysis of Pippin’s burnt-wood paintings within the broader question of how the American Age of Wood and African American experiences overlapped from 1800 through the 1940s, a connection thus far understudied by cultural and environmental historians.
About Susan Scott Parish
Scotti Parrish is the Valerie Traub Collegiate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. In her research and teaching, she addresses how American environments and human categories and experiences (of race and citizenship) have been co-created since the beginning of European colonization. To understand these processes, she has considered an array of media, from conversations, specimen gifts, Vaudeville comedy, and film to the female Opossum and the Mississippi River. She has written American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (2006), The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (2017), co-edited The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Environment and edited the Norton Critical Edition of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! She is at work on a book provisionally titled Out of the Wood Work: American Forests and Black Cultures, 1776-1940. She is Chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows.