It is matter of SETTLER taste: J. Zoe Malot, ‘Curating settler aesthetics: settler colonial erasures, urban artscapes, and artistic interventions in settler cities’, Journal of Cultural Geography, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

It is matter of SETTLER taste: J. Zoe Malot, ‘Curating settler aesthetics: settler colonial erasures, urban artscapes, and artistic interventions in settler cities’, Journal of Cultural Geography, 2026

22Jul26

Abstract: This paper examines the governance of urban aesthetics by studying the curatorial and regulatory bodies behind public art productions in settler colonial cities. I demonstrate how public art regulations – through mural ordinances and city permits – (re)produce settler colonial agendas and perpetuate Indigenous invisibility. Drawing from in-depth interviews with artists, urban planners, city councilors, and community members throughout Aotearoa (New Zealand), I demonstrate how settler cities promote specific forms of (in)visibility through the public art that is created, contested, and censored. By paying close attention to the artists and aesthetics selected (and rejected) through arts-led development projects, we can see how public art in cities – despite varying geographic contexts – contributes to the (re)production of exclusionary conditions through settler aesthetics. Drawing from literary scholars, settler colonial scholarship and decolonial art theory, I use the term settler aesthetics to highlight how aesthetics function within evolving sociospatial practices where state and non-state actors exercise power, formulate settler representations of the city, and influence belonging. While this paper points to the visual logics of exclusion embedded in settler aesthetics, it also highlight artists who unsettle these logics through decolonial public art practices to offer a more engaged and just form of creative placemaking.

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