Category: VISUAL ARTS

In the old world of 2019, the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, the largest survey of its kind, asked galleries all over the world a question: what are the biggest and most pressing challenges you face?

It’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon, and Eyal Weizman is at his central command — his London living room, which has been his base of operations since the outset of the pandemic. A vase of peonies is visible on the table behind him. His dog, Bernie, leaps into the frame, something about his shaggy visage evoking his eponym. His teenage daughter wanders through, making goofy faces to distract her father. His phone buzzes incessantly.

‘We are birds that do not kill.’ This declaration opened California-based artist Helen Mirra’s 2019 manifesto CATHARTES 19, setting out a series of principles and practices responding to concerns for climate collapse, plastic waste and the treatment of nonhuman living beings.

As U.S. cities struggle to cope with scorching temperatures in urban heat zones that have been worsened by climate change, a Boston-based regional planning group is encouraging communities to use art in their cooling measures and in building support for efforts that address resiliency.

Biology professor Chris Gough’s research papers are incomplete without the standard written explanations and graphs detailing his lab’s findings. To enhance the accessibility and broad comprehension of scientific papers conveying technical research on forest and wetland ecosystems, Gough involves science-oriented art students, who also engage in the lab’s field-based research.

The Jefferson Museum of Art and History will present an interdisciplinary exhibition that features the 47 consecutive years of Arctic research by ornithologist George Divoky.

SCIENCE AND ART were tangled up together for Todd Gilens, M.L.A. ’02, ever since the childhood afternoons he spent at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “My father had an office nearby,” Gilens recalls, “and we would go meet him for lunch and walk through the galleries,” which were hung with paintings by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning—“all these 1960s masterpieces.”

Riders might soon find a surprise at your stop along Sacramento Regional Transit’s Gold Line. It could be a sculpture of a butterfly habit built from a chain of interconnected pipes or a kaleidoscope made with mirrors, scrap metals and other waste collected around the region.

“Engaging with art can make the world felt. And this feeling spurs thinking, connection and even action,” says Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic climate-focused artist, about the power of art as activism.

Scientists, ecologists and artists have collaborated to showcase global work to protect seeds in an exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & art gallery (Ramm) in Exeter.