Museums are increasingly hosting climate change works and exhibitions as the world continues to feel the effects of the warming planet. Already in 1999, the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth opened at The American Museum of Natural History, with climate change as one of the five major focus areas. By 2018, climate change was recognized in the museum as “one of the most urgent scientific issues of our time” and the exhibition was updated with a new installation, anchored by a media wall featuring large-scale imagery, animations, text and graphics, and interactive panels. Also by 2018, climate change had its own museum. The first in the country to address climate change exclusively and with a permanent home coming in 2030 at a 24,000-square-foot location near Hudson Yards, The Climate Museum opened its first show on January 25, 2018, bathing the outside sidewalk in a cool blue light from a video of the Greenland Ice Sheet, a new work by Los Angeles artist Peggy Weil. By summer, 2021, its founder Miranda Massie, was on Governors Island launching a poster campaign called Beyond Lies, a collaboration between the museum and Mona Chalabi, journalist and illustrator. Still fully committed to the cause of galvanizing action through learning, she said, “We always try to bring art and science together, and without the science, we’d be nowhere.…”
Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene found a home in a huge exhibition celebrating 44 artists at the Canton Arts Center at Stanford University in 2025.
It will come as no surprise that major exhibitions are also taking place outside of the U.S. Beneath the Turning Sky in Bengaluru, India, is a good example. A three-year exhibition at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) on view through December 2028, it traces humanity's long, fractured relationship with the natural world through three chapters. The exhibition does not announce climate change. It leads to it, trusting that the arc, not the argument, is what holds people long enough to think.
And sometimes art takes over a city as it did in Chicago in 2021 with works sprawling throughout the city, using the physical world as a display for artwork about societal issues and climate change. In this case the MacArthur Foundation invited 29 of its genius grantees to showcase work exploring issues of environmental racism. As the world continues to change, the way artists and exhibitions display their work will change with it.
