Four Artists Who Are Addressing Climate Change Head-On

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Art doesn’t have to be topical to be good. But, as with Picasso’s Guernica, much of what’s considered “important” art grapples with contemporary events. Even as the globe battles the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, cataclysmic climate change remains a key threat. These four artists are facing it head-on, not only with lofty sentiment but with actions large and small.

Blane De St. Croix

From: Boston
Works in: New York
Focus: Ice melt

Blane De St. Croix uses scale models to demystify geopolitical issues: In 2009 he re-created several miles of the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Texas in a 100-foot miniature, “so the public could actually walk it,” he says. Another project mapped the line between Afghanistan and Pakistan in mountainous Tora Bora. Climate change, he says, is “the next border issue.”

Completed in 2009, one of his first works to deal directly with climate change displayed a West Virginia mountain range with its top removed for strip mining as a 40-foot-long, 22-foot-high model. “I scale up my work so people can’t avoid it,” he says. Soon he was receiving grants and going on scientific expeditions to remote corners of the globe. “I had the opportunity to go to Svalbard [Norway] and travel with scientists to be a witness to glaciers that will never be around again,” he says. “I went to the high Arctic in Alaska, where you can stand on the coast and physically watch the permafrost melt away.”

The trips were illuminating and “increased my responsibility,” De St. Croix says. Many experts he met were desperate for people to tell their stories. His art, he realized, could bring broad audiences into the conversation.

His response has been a series of large-scale manifestations of climate change. Still under construction is a 35-foot-high sculpture depicting the side of a glacier; it will be part of a solo exhibition of his work at Mass MoCA when the museum reopens. He’s building the piece out of 67,000 plastic bottles that were donated by a recycling company and then shredded to resemble ice crystals. He’ll project footage of melting glaciers onto the sculpture. “It’s not horrifying, it’s beautiful,” De St. Croix says. “The audience is brought in visually, and then they realize what they’re looking at.”

Oscar Tuazon

From: Seattle
Works in: Los Angeles
Focus: Water use

Questions of water are always present in Los Angeles. In 2018, Oscar Tuazon was spurred by the ongoing drought to combine art, architecture, and sustainability to create a house designed as a rainwater collection system for heating and cooling. “It started as a studio project,” he says. But after building a modest structure, he began holding public events at the site. He called the project Water School. “The conversation took off,” he says. “It propelled me away from a studio practice toward conversations that were already happening” about water use.

Tuazon began to tour the structure around the country, convening talks, conferences, and information sessions. “In a way, the building is a kind of pedagogical tool in itself,” he says. “It shows how to draw energy from the sun and from water. It’s a way of studying water in each of these places.”

After a trip to Nevada, Tuazon started the next phase of the project. He found a natural spring in a remote area of the state’s Great Basin Desert and purchased 40 acres. “It’s overlooking one of the driest places on Earth,” he says, “but it’s pretty green.” He’s moving pieces of the building there in shipping containers and hopes to open an environmental think tank and advocacy group.

His first plan is to help stop a proposed pipeline that could ruin the ecosystem by diverting almost 50 billion gallons of water from the area’s aquifer to Las Vegas, about 350 miles south. The fight has been led by the Goshute tribe, and Tuazon is eager to participate. “For people who care about this, it’s really important. By extension, it’s important for all of us, because we need to preserve ecosystems—and life.”

Lauren Bon

From: New Haven, Conn.
Works in: Los Angeles
Focus: Water distribution

During a 2005 camping trip to Catalina Island off the Southern California coast, Lauren Bon opened a tent flap and found herself staring at a full-grown bison. She eventually discovered, to her horror, that the animals had been brought over for a Zane Grey Western that had been filmed on the island in the 1920s; over the decades, they’d grown into a herd that was maintained by culling them for scrap meat. “These sacred animals had been reduced to a burden on the island’s delicate ecosystem and made into dog food,” she says.

Bon organized a coalition of nonprofits and tribal communities to repatriate many of the bison to the Lakota lands in South Dakota. Then a healer there gave her the vision of growing a cornfield in downtown Los Angeles, she says.

Bon is a member of the philanthropic Annenberg family and a vice president and director of its foundation. Through contacts at the Natural Resources Defense Council, she petitioned the city to let her take over a 32-acre former rail yard between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights, near her studio.

“It was a completely public space,” she says. “The entire cycle was a performative action, from planting the seeds to harvesting.” People from the community visited, wandered through the stalks, and used the kernels in their own gardens afterward. Others were brought back to the Lakota lands, where a ceremonial cornfield was planted.

A subsequent, ongoing effort is called “Bending the River Back Into the City,” which Bon says is a “civil engineering project disguised as an art piece.” It entails redirecting the Los Angeles River and redistributing the water to city parks in the process. The action has broad implications, Bon says: “It’s a case study of how an art project can make a hyperlocal amendment to a system that isn’t working, to support living systems. It’s highly replicable.”

Mika Rottenberg

From: Buenos Aires
Works in: New York
Focus: Studio sustainability

It’s not always obvious how much carbon-burning travel and wasted material goes into mounting a museum show, but multimedia artist Mika Rottenberg is combating this excess, first with her studio.

Begin with travel: In many cases, before a museum starts to plan a show, it flies the artist to meet with organizers, no matter where, around the world. “Then you plan the show and might do another site visit. And then you fly back for the opening, and then back again for an artist talk,” Rottenberg says. That’s not including flights for studio assistants, curators, and others involved, multiplied by hundreds of exhibits a year.

Consider walls, too: Museums and galleries often build new walls for every show and discard them afterward. Artist studios tend to operate similarly when it comes to materials and supplies.

Once Rottenberg tallied up the environmental cost of her practice and multiplied it to a global scale, she made a series of dramatic changes. Now she does site visits through FaceTime and has greatly reduced her traveling for shows. If she ships materials, she does it in the most environmentally sound way. (Shipping art by sea freight used to be standard; it’s now common to use air freight.) And she’s placed a heavy emphasis on using a museum’s existing walls. For a show in Bologna, Italy, in 2019, she installed her work in smaller rooms, using the existing walls, “and it ended up more successful, with a better layout.”

Most important, Rottenberg is using her position as an international art star to change the behavior of museums and encourage them to organize exhibitions differently. “I’m not preaching or telling anyone how to do it,” she says. “But just bringing sustainability practices up to museums and galleries has some power.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.