About the Book This book examines how postwar notions of form developed in response to newly perceived environmental threats, which inspired artists to model plastic composition on natural systems often invisible to the human eye. Melissa S. Ragain focuses on the history of art education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to understand how an environmental approach to form inspired new art programs at Harvard and MIT. As they embraced scientistic theories of composition, these institutions also cultivated young artists as environmental agents who could influence urban design and contribute to an ecologically sensitive public sphere. Ragain combines institutional and intellectual histories to map how the emergency of environmental crisis altered foundational modernist assumptions about form, transforming questions about aesthetic judgment into questions about an ethical relationship to the environment-- Book Synopsis Domesticating the Invisible examines how postwar notions of form developed in response to newly perceived environmental threats, in turn inspiring artists to model plastic composition on natural systems often invisible to the human eye. Melissa S. Ragain focuses on the history of art education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to understand how an environmental approach to form inspired new art programs at Harvard and MIT. As they embraced scientistic theories of composition, these institutions also cultivated young artists as environmental agents who could influence urban design and contribute to an ecologically sensitive public sphere. Ragain combines institutional and intellectual histories to map how the emergency of environmental crisis altered foundational modernist assumptions about form, transforming questions about aesthetic judgment into questions about an ethical relationship to the environment. From the Back Cover Melissa Ragain has produced a brilliantly disruptive work of intellectual history on the problematic of visibility in postwar America. An aesthetics of the invisible, giving form to unseen toxicities or fields of energy, emerged as a critical means of comprehending the environment. Ragain deftly connects the dots between a wide range of historical sources and artistic precedents, showing how cultural production responded to the urgencies of a historical moment.--Kirsten Swenson, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Massachusetts, Lowell Melissa Ragains beautifully illustrated book explores how concepts of the environment moved to the foreground of artists thinking after World War II. Drawing on an impressive array of evidence, Ragain documents how a new aesthetic sensibility developed in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts. This excellent book connects art pedagogy and the science of design and perception with the eras increasingly influential environmental movement.--Patrick McCray, author of Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture About the Author Melissa S. Ragain is Associate Professor of Art History at Montana State University. She is the editor of Jack Burnhams collected writings, Dissolve into Comprehension: Writing and Interviews 1964-2004, and has written for journals including X-Tra, Art Journal, and American Art.