ART + CLIMATE CRISIS

Artists

A curated list of artists whose work addresses climate change. Resources curated by Vaishnavi Patil.

Maya Lin

Maya Lin is most known for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., for which she won a nationwide design competition in 1982. Lin is known for her critical engagement with notions of site and place through a multidisciplinary, ecologically-minded practice. Her first solo show in Pace Gallery Seoul, Nature Knows No Boundaries, features works where Lin investigates and visualizes water in various forms.

Ravi Agrawal

Ravi Agarwal has an interdisciplinary practice as an artist, photographer, environmental campaigner, writer, and curator. His work ranges from conceptual to performative art. His project, Down and Out: Labouring under Global Capitalism (1997-2000), was the first major photographic work on migrant labor in India. He has contributed to the “Anthropocene India 2018” project, which facilitates dialogue at the intersection of traditional disciplinary categories of knowledge-making, bringing together artists, cultural practitioners, natural and social scientists, policy people, activists, and thinkers.

John Akomfrah

John Akomfrah is a British artist of Ghanaian descent whose works span themes of memory, post-colonialism, the experiences of migrants worldwide, and the climate crisis. Akomfrah’s three-screen film installation Vertigo Sea (2015) focuses on the disorder and cruelty of the whaling industry. It juxtaposes it with scenes of many generations of migrants making epic ocean crossings for a better life. His work, “Purple,” a six-channel video installation that draws upon his travels in French Polynesia to address climate change, human communities, and the wilderness, made its US premiere at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2019.

Daniel Beltra

The Spanish photographer Daniel Beltra is known for his focus on aerial photography, which “easily allows for the juxtaposition of nature with the destruction wrought by unsustainable development.” One of his best-known photographs is an image of the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010). His work Poles (2007-2012) also seeks to reveal the urgent nature of the crisis in the Poles.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is an artist and curator based in Karachi whose work resurrects complex histories in the South Asian, South West Asian, and North African regions. He unpacks the intersections of religion, storytelling, futurity, and ecology through a multi-media practice rooted in printmaking, textile, and performance. Bhutto’s current project, Bulhan Nameh (2022), seeks to understand the Indus River’s cultural, ecological, and social history through the eyes of one of Pakistan’s most elusive animals, the Indus River Dolphin.

Katherine Boland

Katherine Boland makes art about the beauty and mystery of the natural world using non-traditional mediums. The British-born, Australia-based artist Katherine was inspired to make art to raise awareness about climate change after experiencing the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires firsthand. The project titled Output: Art After Fire was supported by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade following the fires.

Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang’s work has spanned multiple artistic mediums, including drawing, painting, installation, video, and performance art. One of Cai’s primary mediums is gunpowder, which he began using for painting in his hometown Quanzhou. His show titled “The Ninth Wave” (2014) grappled with nature’s helplessness in the face of modern man’s relentless, Promethean drive to progress. One of his poignant works related to environmental issues faced today is “Silent Ink,” an installation of a pond filled with ink, which, at first glance, seems to draw from traditional landscapes with calligraphy, but alludes to a more significant problem China faces — the polluted lakes and rivers that they are too toxic even for industrial use.

Alejandro Duran

Alejandro Duran’s Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape (which began in 2010) is an environmental installation and photography project that transforms the international debris washing up on Mexico's Caribbean coast into aesthetic yet disquieting works. Durán has identified plastic waste from fifty-eight nations and territories on six continents that have washed ashore along the coast of Sian Ka’an, one of Mexico's largest federally-protected nature reserves and a UNESCO World Heritage site. He uses this international debris to create color-based, site-specific sculptures that conflate the hand of man and nature. The resulting photo series depicts a new form of colonization by consumerism, where even undeveloped land is not safe from the far-reaching impact of our disposable lifestyle. The project raises awareness and changes our relationship to consumption and waste.

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson strongly advocates for the environment through his sculptures and photography, among other mediums. His work, “Weather Project” (2003), an enormous artificial sun shrouded by mist, installed in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, brought an experiential narrative to knowledge about global warming. “The Glacier Melt Series 1999/2019” (2019), another climate change-focused piece, is a poignant piece of work that brings together thirty pairs of images from 1999 and 2019 to reveal the dramatic impact of global warming on our world. The Icelandic–Danish artist was appointed goodwill ambassador for renewable energy and climate action by the United Nations Development Program in 2019.

Ana Teresa Fernández

With a diverse thematic scope of Land, history, gender, climate, and culture, the Mexican-born, San Francisco-based artist Ana Teresa Fernández has worked on major public projects, including On The Horizon, featured in the 2021 Lands End exhibition. The work demonstrates the risk of rising sea levels in her community and coastal communities worldwide. Fernandez characterizes her work as “Magical Non-fiction,” where “unimaginable conditions are the reality; I seek to portray dreamscapes of what’s possible. The courage to transform is up to us.”

Vibha Galhotra

Vibha Galhotra is an Indian artist engaged in site-specific work and public art interventions―she addresses the shifting topography of a world radically transformed by climate change, consumerism, capitalism, and globalization. Her sculptures, installations, photographs, and videos utilize intensive research and intuitive imagination to investigate human activity’s social, economic, and political implications on the environment. Her recent works include Flow (2015), a wall hanging composed of ghungroos (small, metallic bells worn by classical Indian and Pakistani dancers), capturing the indictments of urbanization and environmental degradation.

Allison Janae Hamilton

In her work, Allison Janae Hamilton draws inspiration from her roots growing up in the South. Her immersive installations and mythic landscapes draw from family narratives, epic folklore, vernacular architecture, hoodoo, and Black Nature writing with an eye toward the social and political concerns of the changing Southern landscape. Her work, such as “Florida Water I” (2019), engages haunting yet epic mythologies that address the social and political concerns of today's changing southern terrain, including land loss, environmental justice, climate change, and sustainability.” Another work on Pier 3 of Brooklyn Bridge Park, Waters of a Lower Register (2020), embeds into the expanse of the horizon line of the East River, bringing together contrasting but interrelated natural sightlines. Shot in part in the aftermath of a tropical storm, the installation gestures towards the complex environmental issues and social histories of the Brooklyn waterfront.

Julie Heffernan

Julie Heffernan’s art engages with subjects ranging from the environment to history and feminism. With her work, When the Water Rises (2017), a series of paintings that create alternative habitats in response to environmental disaster and planetary excess, she creates a new kind of historical painting that invites the viewer to analyze the details and, in turn, reveals those people and activities implicated in recent calamities of both the physical and socio-political environment.

Lorenzo Quinn

Through thought-provoking art installations, such as Give, installed in the Death Valley National Park, Lorenzo Quinn’s work often asks, “Can we save the planet... and save ourselves in the meantime?” Quinn is an Italian sculptor best known for his massive recreations of human hands, which he considers the most complicated and most technically challenging part of the human body, which holds the power to love, hate, create, and destroy. Many of Quinn’s sculptures, including Support — a commentary on the threat of rising seas to Venice’s historic city, grapple with environmental issues, including the climate crisis.

Nichole Sobecki

Nichole Sobecki’s work illuminates “humanity’s fraught, intimate, and ultimately unbreakable connection to the natural world.” The Kenya-based photographer and filmmaker captures the complex and multifaceted problems underway through sustained photography. For instance, her work Where Our Land Was (2017) takes us on a journey of a mother who didn't flee civil war but fled the drought in Somalia and highlights the dire conditions that the land of Somalia faces due to climate change.

Jason deCaires Taylor

Jason deCaires Taylor’s art, which includes many large-scale underwater sculpture exhibits, reflects his interest in environmentalism. Through his pioneering public art projects, Taylor aims to create works of art that “seek to encourage environmental awareness, instigate social change and lead us to appreciate the breathtaking natural beauty of the underwater world.” Some of his recent work includes a series of sculptures encrusted with artificially grown copper crystals, which replicate the natural formation of corals found on underwater artwork installations.

Sharbendu De

Indian artist Sharbendu De’s work has focused on the subject of climate change and human survival in the Anthropocene. His conceptual series An Elegy for Ecology (2016-21) premiered at Phantasmopolis at the Asian Art Biennale 2021, Taiwan, highlights human disregard towards nature and the disbelief in the climate crisis through photography. His work has covered natural disasters such as the Nepal earthquakes (2015), Jammu & Kashmir Floods (2014), Uttarakhand flash floods (2013 & 2014) and the Asian Tsunami (2004-08). He was the 2022 Visiting Artist Fellow at the Harvard University.

Exhibitions

A curated list of exhibitions, and organizations dedicated to promoting artists’ role in addressing the climate crisis. Resources curated by Vaishnavi Patil.

Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology

This traveling exhibition (2021-22) and catalog give artists a voice to address the long-term effects of these artificial disasters on Indigenous communities in the United States and worldwide. The artworks in the exhibition document international Indigenous artists’ responses to the impacts of nuclear testing, nuclear accidents, and uranium mining on Native peoples and the environment. Indigenous artists from Australia, Canada, Greenland, Japan, Pacific Islands, and the United States utilize local and tribal knowledge and Indigenous and contemporary art forms as visual strategies for their thought-provoking artworks.

no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria

“no existe un mundo poshuracán” is a verse borrowed from Puerto Rican poet Raquel Salas Rivera, which translates as “a post-hurricane world doesn't exist.” This exhibition (2022-23) memorializes the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria—a high-end Category 4 storm that hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. The exhibition explores how artists have responded to the transformative years since that event by bringing together more than fifty artworks made over the last five years by an intergenerational group of more than fifteen artists from Puerto Rico and the diaspora.

Next Season: Art and Science in the Face of the Climate Future

This 2021 exhibition showcased works depicting climate change adaptation and mitigation developed by eight artists during residencies in some of the most important scientific centers in Costa Rica. The works addressed specific problems and highlighted the interconnectedness that underlies those problems derived from climate change.

The Rain Room

This early installation at MOMA, New York, from 2013 invites visitors to explore science, technology, and human ingenuity in stabilizing our environment. Using digital technology, Rain Room created a carefully choreographed downpour, simultaneously encouraging people to become performers on an unexpected stage and creating an intimate atmosphere of contemplation.

Indicators: Artists on Climate Change

This 2018 exhibition brings together seventeen contemporary artists at Storm King’s Museum to present work that engages with the scientific, cultural, personal, and psychological challenges climate change has brought upon humankind. Several artists draw inspiration from Storm King’s landscape and local ecosystem to speak to broader environmental issues, global climate trends, and human ways of life. The artists, including Maya Lin and Allison Janae Hamilton, address a range of ideas, parsing the enormously complex topic of a climate in flux.

Points of Return

This exhibition (2023) was on view at The Umbrella Arts Center in Concord, MA, with five themed spaces dedicated to wide-ranging aspects of the climate crisis. The exhibition acted as a counter-narrative for the often suggested “point of no return” from climate change and emphasized that solutions remain within sight. Through dynamic display and crossing several artistic disciplines, this 27-artist show provided commentary, reflection, and creative therapeutic strategies.

Climate Action: Inspiring Change

Peabody Essex Museum’s timely exhibition (2023) brought together dynamic contemporary art, hands-on experiences, and inspiring works by youth artists to help guide us toward making a difference for the planet. The exhibition combined creativity, science, and participation to raise awareness about climate change issues, focusing on known solutions, including Indigenous practices.

Rising Waters: Photographs of Sandy

This 2014 exhibition marked one-year after Superstorm Sandy and focused on the impacts on individuals and their homes, streets, and neighborhoods. The works in this show were submitted by over a thousand professional and amateur photographers who responded to an open call for images in the storm's wake. The juried exhibition featured striking before-and-after images of the hurricane's impact on the New York region, including preparations, the storm's destructive effects, and the ongoing rebuilding efforts. The exhibition is of a community nature, which is also emphasized in its programming— a well-timed reminder that climate change can be effectively tackled as a collective effort.

Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya

The Himalayas are home to some of the world's most magnificent peaks and largest glaciers, which supply crucial seasonal flows to rivers across Asia. Yet they are disappearing at an alarming rate. This exhibition (2010) at the Asia Society, New York, presented new photographs of these "water towers of Asia" by mountaineer and photographer David Breashears alongside archival photographs taken over the past century by some of the world's most outstanding mountain photographers. The comparison starkly reveals the catastrophic loss of ice during the intervening years.