Visual Arts

VISUAL ARTS

VISUAL ARTS

Painters and sculptors are finding astonishing ways to visualize climate change like the huge site specific installations from Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s work which involved transporting 12 blocks of ice that came from free-floating icebergs from the Greenland ice sheet, then arranging them in a clock formation to indicate the passing of time. The ice sculptures were left to slowly melt. 

A New York artist, Eve Mosher walked almost 70 miles across Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, painting a chalk line showing the likely location of frequent flooding if sea levels continued to rise. And, then there is The Birth of Venus but in this 21st century version, artist Chris Jordan replaces Botticelli’s paints with 240,000 plastic bags, equal to the number consumed throughout the world every ten seconds.

Louis Schwartzberg is a photographer who creates moving images celebrating the earth, much the way our website does as it captures the beauty of the earth in still photographs. Ranging from a few minutes to under an hour, these meditations on nature are mesmerizing. Try this one on inner peace.

Meditation Series: Messengers of Life Meditation

NEWS

That dreamy haze in Monet’s impressionist paintings? Air pollution, study says.

By Kasha Patel   01/31/23  
Claude Monet was “terrified.” He looked outside and saw a scene across the London landscape that worried him: no fog, clear skies.
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Puerto Ricans Expand the Scope of ‘American Art’ at the Whitney

By Holland Cotter   11/25/22  
For many North Americans, the lasting news image of Hurricane Maria, the monster storm that laid waste to Puerto Rico in 2017, wasn’t of the storm itself, but of a political photo-op that followed, when…
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At COP 27, an artist asks attendees to feel climate change — literally

By Kelsey Ables   11/12/22  
As world leaders debate climate change policies at COP27, the annual U.N. climate summit running through Friday in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Bahia Shehab wants to turn up the temperature — literally. The Cairo-based artist has…
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This artist gets up to her neck in water to spread awareness of climate change

By Matthew Schverman   09/09/22  
Sarah Cameron Sunde, an interdisciplinary artist, was visiting Maine in 2013 when she noticed something in an ocean inlet. The tide was coming in quickly and completely covered a rock, making it disappear within 30-40…
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Maggi Hambling’s Visceral Abstractions Reflect Environmental Destruction

By Ilana Novick   04/20/22  
I first learned of Maggi Hambling from her polarizing public sculptures. A bust of writer Oscar Wilde lounges in a green granite coffin, smoking a cigarette and laughing at passersby behind St. Martins in the…
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This Artist Is Reimagining the World After the Climate Crisis

By Shamani Joshi   03/25/22  
For most of us, envisioning a world battered by the climate crisis is almost too excruciating. After all, it would require us to swallow the inconvenient truth and face our deepest fears.
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How Should Art Reckon With Climate Change?

By Zoe Lescaze   03/25/22  
NOT LONG AFTER he joined the Princeton University Art Museum in 2006, the curator Karl Kusserow wore a bracelet bearing the phrase “Stop global warming” to a staff meeting. His colleagues noticed (“It was,” he…
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11 VISUAL ARTISTS TAKING ON THE CLIMATE CRISIS

02/18/22  
Be they sculptors, painters, photographers, or filmmakers, these artists are sparking important conversations about the climate crisis and inspiring action around the world.
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D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER)

02/18/22  
The DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER) is a monthly discussion forum on art and science projects in the national capital region and beyond. DASERs provide the public with a snapshot of the cultural environment…
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Miami residents are climate change refugees in this immersive art experience

By Jordan Levin A   01/28/22  
“Prelude to 2100” is artist Susan Caraballo’s vision of a future Miami besieged by climate change. Set decades from now, this immersive arts experience allows us to see much of what we’ll need in order…
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Mapping Climate Grief, One Pixel at a Time

By Julian Lucas   01/20/22  
Last year, the Tribeca Film Festival awarded its inaugural prize in game design to Norco, a point-and-click adventure set in a refinery town on the Mississippi River. Designed by a small collaborative, Geography of Robots,…
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Drought, Fires, Floods, Mudslides and One Devastating Deep Freeze: The Images of 2021

12/21/21  
This year brought numerous weather disasters and countless opportunities to snap images of the power of nature.
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Climate art creates social change

By Emilie Murphy   11/05/21  
Artists have considered the natural world since prehistoric times. From early cave paintings to Flemish landscapes, from the Hudson River School to today, there has always been a relationship between nature and the arts.
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Da Vinci Of Data Art: Glacier Scientist Uses Watercolors To Highlight Environmental Issues

By Jacob Wycoff   10/18/21  
With every stroke of Jill Pelto’s brush, moments in time are captured before they literally melt away. She’s the Caravaggio of Climate Change and a Da Vinci of Data Art. Pelto is a glacier scientist…
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Could the energy-hungry NFT undo the art world’s attempts to become more sustainable?

By Tom Seymour   10/13/21  
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…
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The Artists Bringing Activism Into and Beyond Gallery Spaces

By Megan O' Grady   10/01/21  
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…
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Challenging the Art World’s Material Waste

By Tom Jeffreys   10/01/21  
‘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…
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Cities use art to combat extreme urban heat

By Kat Friedrich   08/23/21  
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…
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Forest ecology, illustrations and jam sessions: How arts and science mix in Chris Gough’s lab

By Dina Weinstein   08/17/21  
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…
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Seeing climate change through art

08/17/21  
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.
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A Landscape Architect’s Outdoor Artwork

By Lydialyle Gibson   08/17/21  
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,…
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The Earth is changing. This Northern California art pop-up shows what we can do about it

By Christine Delianne   08/16/21  
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…
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‘Code Red’ Climate Activism Art Around the World

By Kathleen Rellihan   08/12/21  
"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.
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Top seeds: artists capture global efforts to future-proof nature – in pictures

By Anna Turns   08/02/21  
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.
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Helen Frankenthaler Foundation announces its first round of climate grants to art institutions

By Nancy Kenney   07/28/21  
The incentives for US art museums to green their operations are expanding, with an announcement today from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation that it is awarding $5.1m to 79 institutions across the US in its first…
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Art that points toward a sustainable future in the middle of a climate crisis

By TimesOC Staff   07/21/21  
The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art put an international call out for “The Anthropocene Epiphany: Art and Climate Change” exhibit. The show is centered on Anthropocene, a time period in which humans have a…
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Worcester County raised scientist Jill Pelto uses art to shed light on climate change

By Nicole Nelson   07/18/21  
“When you first meet Jill, you don’t see all of her,” says Lynne Pelto, the stepmother of climate change artist Jill Pelto. “You really need to spend some time with her to get to know…
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Climate Art Sets Sail for the Poles

By Clara Chaisson   07/16/21  
There’s a lot to consider when curating an art exhibit that showcases more than 50 artists working across diverse media including drawings, paintings, videos, sculptures, and soundscapes. Now imagine doing it on a ship bound…
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The Peabody Essex Museum’s Climate + Environment Initiative Seeks to Create a Different Climate Future

By Jane Winchell   07/16/21  
As the director of an interactive art and nature space, I’ve included climate change as a topic in many shows and programs over the years. But until recently, I had convinced myself that focusing an…
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Microclimates: A Greener Future for Collection Care

By Joyce Lee and Kelly Krish   07/06/21  
There are many options available for museums to address climate action and become more sustainable, but recent work at two institutions has highlighted the value in one particular method: creating “microclimates” which confine environmental conditions…
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An Army of 100 Bots Is Reading Climate Change News and Clicking Every Ad Along the Way

By Gita Jackson   06/03/21  
In an echo-y Zoom call with four full pages of participants, you can watch dozens of bots read articles about climate change, and click every ad along the way while they're at it, to support…
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Climate change plays heavy in latest Micket-Stackhouse exhibition at Creative Pinellas

By Jennifer Ring   05/28/21  
Floridians have always responded to climate change in interesting ways, from denying it’s happening to suggesting that the Navy drop ice into the Gulf of Mexico to stop Hurricane Dorian. And let’s not forget that…
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NFTs may be the future of art — but are they threatening the future of the planet?

By Sophie Lewis   05/17/21  
A digital artist known as Beeple sold a piece of entirely digital art through Christie's for over $69 million in March, flipping the art world upside down. But the digital registry where that piece of…
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Artists chronicle climate change in the Arctic and Antarctic

By Kristen Pope   05/12/21  
Rising 20,310 feet above sea level, Alaska’s Denali is the tallest mountain in North America, and when it is fully visible – a relative rarity since it frequently is enshrouded in cloud – the mass…
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Painting a Picture of Climate Change

By Katie Van Syckle   04/20/21  
Climate change can be an unsettling subject for anyone, but it can be downright frightening for children. To explain the topic to young people, The New York Times’s Climate desk published a guide, “Bad Future,…
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People Who Need Beeple: NFTs Yet Another Climate Headache

By Peter Sinclair   04/13/21  
2 weeks ago I did not know what an NFT (Non Fungible Token) was. Not sure I do today, but they’re yet another problem inflicted on us by people who have too much time on…
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Waters of a lower register

03/21/21  
Allison Janae Hamilton’s Waters of a Lower Register is an immersive 5-channel film installation that uses the material of land—and the histories and tensions carried within—as a metaphor to reflect the range of emotions that this…
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Micro Meets Macro

By Sandra Goldmark   02/02/21  
What are we making, anyway? Designers have to have a built-in zoom function. They must be able to look at a little detail – a button, a stripe – and understand how it will contribute…
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‘I almost cracked’: 16-month artistic performance of mass extinction comes to a close

By Stephanie Eslake   01/25/21  
The Hobart artist Lucienne Rickard has spent five weeks drawing a large-scale pencil sketch of the critically endangered bird. Picking up her eraser, she tells her audience, “If we don’t do something soon, this is what will happen.”
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Colorado Mural Project Hopes to Shift Climate Beliefs

By Emily Denny   01/07/21  
The Colorado non-profit CORE, The Community Office for Resource Efficiency, is calling upon the public to submit a self-portrait and a 90-second story to be featured on an upcoming mural installation. The murals will span…
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Scientists and Art Historians Are Studying Art for Climate Change Clues

By Climate Nexus   05/29/20  
Scientists and art historians are studying art for signs of climate change and to better understand the ways Western culture's relationship to nature has been altered...
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‘More Blue’: An Artwork Shows the Sea Changing During Lockdown

By Nina Siegal   05/27/20  
A data-driven media installation, created to reflect marine conditions around the world, has altered with the slowing human activity.
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The 20 Best Environmentalist Artworks of the Past 50 Years

By Alex Greenberger   04/22/20  
One may not immediately think of Robert Rauschenberg as a political artist, but indeed he used his boundary-breaking art toward political means, and environmentalism was one of his favored causes. In 1970, on the occasion…
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These 10 Artists Are Making Urgent Work about the Environment

By Shannon Lee   04/20/20  
The natural world has been a source of inspiration for artists since time immemorial. The Earth is a running thread that links together the prehistoric cave paintings of Chauvet, Katsushika Hokusai’s great wave, and Ana…
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An artist set out to paint climate change. She ended up on a journey through grief

By Julia Rosen   01/11/20  
It had been a long day and Daniela Molnar’s mind was wandering when she saw the shape. The shape of what was already lost; the shape of something new that had just come into being.
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As Jetsetters Prepare to Descend on the Eroding Shores of Miami, Art Basel Awkwardly Tries to Address Climate Change

By Eileen Kinsella and Naomi Rea   12/02/19  
As Art Basel Miami Beach prepares to open this week, the subject of climate change has once again come center stage in the art world. One of the American cities most vulnerable to climate disasters,…
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Maya Lin Focuses on Consequences of Climate Change in New Commission for Madison Square Park Conservancy Opening June 2020

11/12/19  
Ghost Forest  Will Create Grove of Spectral Trees within Park’s Verdant Landscape, Building on Lin’s History of Environmentalism within her Artistic Practice
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