Tacoma Chapter
Our solution to climate change? Democracy.
Murals and Installations
OceanSole, Kenyan nonprofit founded by Julie Church, has been turning trashed flip-flops into art since 2013.
In Kenya, beaches are littered not just with piles of the cheap and popular domestic sandals, but its East-facing shoreline is dumped with flip-flops from the Middle East, South Asia and Australasia, posing a terrible hazard to marine and shore life. OceanSole's mission is "to clean polluted beaches and waterways while providing careers to artisans in high-impact communities." They have created a process to clean and carve the multi-colored plastic pieces into bright whimsical animals of all types and sizes. The foam layers are often glued together into larger blocks for sculpting, taking advantage of the contours and patterns that creates. Traditional woodcarving tools and designs are used, as woodcarvers transition to this new material. The shavings and other leavings are gathered and formed into mattresses donated to refugee centers. OceanSole has achieved a global market supplying the gift shops of some of the world's most famous zoos and aquariums. ​​
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Orca Vibes, Angelina Villalobos Soto aka ONESEVENNINE, 2022, mural. Latine street artist from Seattle. I first saw this garage door mural strolling with my daughter and her dog in Capital Hill! Soon I discovered that 179 has works all over the area, plus environmental justice projects (Cheyenne River Youth, SD). Her style seems to progress from more intricately patterned, Asian-inspired motifs (Microsoft Luck Dragon 2018 not shown), Starbucks Coffee Plant Canopy 2019, and Climate Pledge Arena Be Like Water 2021) to the simpler shapes of bold bright color in Orca Vibes and recent works. Consistent throughout, however, is a powerful design sense bursting with power and character--evoking nature's vitality. This very community-minded artist gives back with youth workshops and beautification projects like her "adopt a street stencil" project. She says, "my work follows a quote from local KEXP VJ Gabe Teodros if a tree can't grow there, I can't grow there, highlighting the struggle of what it means to grow in difficult spaces."
One Central Park, Sydney. Jean Nouvel, Patrick Blanc, and others, 2013. This double-tower residential building was the first stage of an urban renewal project combining sustainability and self-sufficiency. Its main features are the vertical hanging gardens, cantilevered heliostat, low carbon tri-generation power plant, and internal water recycling plant (the largest ever done at this time).
French botanist Patrick Blanc designed the "vertical veil of vegetation" to grow on all sides of the buildings, (also the largest of its type), using a hydroponic (soilless) system with over 85 K plants carefully chosen and still thriving! Besides the aesthetic value, the resultant green facades release oxygen, trap carbon dioxide, and offer cooling shade. The cantilevered heliostat suspended from the 28th floor of the East tower reflects light to them and also to the atrium below through an intricate system of mirrors and sensors. (They are not solar panels, alas.)
The low carbon tri-generation power plant, although using natural gas, is still twice as efficient and produces far fewer emissions than Australia's then-standard use of coal. An internal water recycling plant covers the needs of the entire project including the plants and thousands of homes. At the time, "it was the world's biggest membrane bioreactor closed-loop recycled water facility."
Truly a landmark green architectural project on a giant scale, the remarkable achievement received a 5 Green Star rating and multiple LEAF awards.
Dr.Ed Hawkins, Climate Stripes, 2018. This simple graphic depiction of the global temperature rise over the past two centuries was created by a professor at the University of Reading. Each stripe represents the average temperature for a year compared to 1961-2010, with blue being cooler than average and red hotter. (The most recent section is very red!) The website provides downloadable stripes for various locations around the world, and within a week of its launch in 2019, over a million people did just that. Stripes have been used for every conceivable place and purpose, from TV weather reports to clothing, from mugs to giant projections on land formations and famous buildings! There is an annual Show your Stripes Day, a "call for everyone to share the stripes and send a powerful message about our changing climate."
Thanks to Linda Cohan for this suggestion!
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Pollinator Pathmaker, Berlin Museum of Natural History Pollinator Garden, 2022. Craig P. Burrows, Bee's vision of a Sunflower, photo. Plants in "Pollinator Vision", digital "pollinator art" renderings. Bees can see polarized light, electric charges and scent plumes of flowers. They can't see red, but can detect ultraviolet colors and can see and map individual colors in flowers five times faster than humans.
When British artist Ginsberg was asked to create a sculpture to raise awareness about pollinators' sharp decline, (including bats, birds, moths, and beetles), she decided to make a sculpture not about, but for them--a garden geared exactly to their needs in all seasons. In order to design this, she developed what she calls an 'altruistic algorithm' with string theory physicist Przemek Witaszcyk "to support the maximum pollinator species possible, including some endangered plants from a curated selection chosen solely for their benefits." To see like a bee!
Her free DIY "algorithm toolbox" on pollinator.art allows anyone to plug in their own yard size and conditions and see 3D visualizations of a plan for their own customized "empathetic" garden. Ginsberg hopes that Pollinator Pathmaker will be “a response to human-made ecological damage. By creating for other species, it uses art to give us empathy and agency to care for them.” Her vision is to “create the largest ever climate positive artwork together, by planting living artworks for pollinators around the world.”
Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), CopenHill, Copenhagen 2019. This spectacular urban recreation space is situated on top of a waste-to-energy power plant that converts as much as 440,000 tons of waste a year into clean energy and heat for hundreds of thousands of homes. It uses waste that is leftover from recycling and sorting household and business-generated waste across the metropolitan area, but its efficiency and the need to keep up energy production led to importing rubbish from other areas too! "Advanced waste treatment technologies ensure minimal emissions, and recycled water is used to cool down waste incineration processes."
"Rather than house the plant in a corner that would soon be unfavorable to nearby residents, the architects decided that the building would be of better use to the public to enjoy"-- outdoor spaces with hiking trails, playgrounds, fitness structures and snow-free ski slopes all year round. Besides, it offers an architecturally dazzling facade, and fantastic panoramic views of the city!​
Luzinterruptus (anonymous art collective based in Madrid), A Plastic Fountain for a Waterless Future, 2012, The Plastic We Live With 2017, Bordeaux, Labyrinth of Plastic Waste, 2023, Shanghai, Literature vs Traffic, 2023, Quebec. For over a decade, in cities all over the globe, this group has created stunning temporary light-based installations made of recycled materials and frequently drawing awareness to plastic waste. But for the installation in Quebec, "a place in the city usually dedicated to speed, pollution, and noise, shall turn, for one night, into a place of peace, quiet, and coexistence, lighted by the soft dim light issued from the book pages. The books will be available for those who want to take them, so the installation will recycle itself and will last as long as its users decide to make it disappear."
​Read more about each project by clicking on the image, then scrolling down the photos to the text.
Thiago Mundano, Stop the Destruction, mural in Sao Paolo funded by Stand.earth, 2024. The Brazilian street artist says "This is perhaps the largest mural ever made with natural pigments"--ash from recent Amazonian wildfires, mud from flooding caused by dam building, earth from drought-parched river and stream beds, and urucum, tribal body paint pigment derived from a red tropical fruit. Standing before smoking burnt tree stumps and parched cracked earth, a portrayal of indigenous activist Alessandra Korap holds a message to US soy giant Cargill-- “Stop the destruction #keepyourpromise." (Cargill says that it will eliminate deforestation from its supply chain in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay by 2025, soy farming being one of the biggest drivers of deforestation) Mundano, who calls himself an “artivist,” said "these billionaires still live in a model based on the destruction of ecosystem biomes and contribute to the climate emergency."
Bullitt Center, 1501 E. Madison St, Seattle, dedicated on Earth Day, 2013. Denis Hayes (principal national organizer of the first Earth Day) is CEO of the Bullitt Foundation, which "leads an effort to mold the major cities of the PNW and BC into models of sustainability for a rapidly urbanizing planet." A 6-storey office building, it features a 575-panel solar roof that produces surplus energy, a rainwater harvesting system that provides for all of its non-potable water needs, composting toilets, energy-efficient windows, lighting, heat pump, regenerative elevator, and more! It used wood harvested sustainably from nearby forests, and recycled metal. It was at the time the "world's greenest commercial building." "It is living proof that a large urban office building can operate on the rainwater that falls on it and can generate as much energy as it uses over the course of a year--in the least sunny city in the country." And the interior design is beautiful, spacious and light-filled! The wood's warm tones and natural patterns, the generous expanses of glass, the graceful proportions throughout, make for an open and comfortable atmosphere.
Jana Ireijos, Vanishing Murals,2020. "I create vanishing murals using charcoal gathered from areas recently affected by wildfires. This material, formed by the heat of the flames, carries the story of destruction and renewal that is intrinsic to the natural world. I spent the pandemic summer of 2020 in quarantine, creating murals of endangered species with the wildfire charcoal. Some were outside and exposed to the elements. They washed away, and were reclaimed by the earth. Others I destroyed myself to illustrate the choices we humans make. My mission with these temporary murals is to illustrate the fragile beauty of our environment which connects us all. I hope they inspire in the viewer a sense of urgency to take collective action and to protect what we love."​
Thanks to Donna Green, who saw this artist give a demonstration in Honolulu's Downtown Art Center, for this suggestion! She saw her paint a beautiful watercolor of a Hawaiian akikiki bird (top right), speak about how it had recently been declared functionally extinct in the wild, then wash the image away. Watch this very emotional experience on Facebook.
Coexistence Collective, The Great Elephant Migration, 100 life-sized elephants made of strips of lantana by a team of 200 indigenous artisans from Southern India. Currently set up in New York, they are on a global fundraising journey for wildlife protection, raising awareness that "humans are a part of a larger web of life, where everything is interconnected. When we harm the earth or other beings we harm ourselves." Each elephant (which is for sale) is a unique sculpture designed by Shubhra Nayar and based on a real animal living in the Nigiri Hills. Lantana is an invasive species that is overtaking forests and driving animals out of their homes. Using it as sculpting material cuts down large quantities of the harmful plant while raising money and awareness for environmental issues at the same time. Beyond that, tons of it is converted into biochar, a black carbon rich in nutrients to improve the soil. The 'elephants' are transported by electric trucks decorated with traditional Indian "lorry art." (Lower left, set up as a herd along the coast in Newport R.I.)
Courtney Mattison, What Will Become, 2018, and Our Changing Seas III, 2011, Huge sculptural installations of glazed stoneware and porcelain. She calls it "a gigantic, vertical, swirling hurricane spiral of corals with the really colorful, healthy ones at the kind of eye of the storm, and then trailing white, bleached coral skeletons that wind out toward the edges." The sharp dividing line between healthy and bleached corals shows how quickly the process can occur, and the giant scale strengthens the message's visceral impact. "I realized how quickly we could lose it if we don’t act urgently to change our lifestyles and policies to preserve it. We protect what we care about,” she says. “I want to bring the beauty of coral reefs above the ocean’s surface and make people fall in love."
Paula Nishikawara, 10,000 Dead Squid, suspended gyotaku on fabric, plastic bags, at the 2024 Tacoma Ocean Fest. This Vancouver BC artist specializes in gyotaku, the Japanese art of making a print from a real fish. She has "developed a contemporary style of the art, especially inspired by her desire to be an advocacy voice for the environment and the oceans." I had the pleasure of speaking with the artist at her installation at Ocean Fest, which combines seaweed-like strips of plastic trash with a large hanging print of dead squid, referring to the 2016 massive die-off in Chile (on right, detail below it). Her exquisite paintings and prints were also in the exhibit (left and lower left), and her workshops in gyotaku (see lower right) for anyone over age 6 sound like fun, if slimy!
Antoine Bertin, 333HZ: Sound of Trees Falling, Paris 2021. In collaboration with Greenpeace France.
French storyteller, music composer and artist Bertin asks, "if a tree falls in a distant forest, and no is around, does it make a sound? The answer is yes." According to Global Forest Watch, 20,000 trees have disappeared every minute on average since 2001. "The human ear cannot perceive 20,000 bpm but instead hears a continuous sound of around 333Hz." The installation invites the visitor to experience the rate of deforestation by means of metronomes installed on the cut edges of logs in a pile. Each strike corresponds to a fallen tree.
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Suze Woolf, State of the Forest, 2017, traveling exhibit installation, and Telegraph Canyon Burned Tree, varnished watercolor on torn paper.
"Thirty of my burned tree paintings were digitally transferred to fabric in three layers: a printed transparent silk organza, a printed solid layer and a plain black layer. The fabric is shaped to fit the contour of the trees and suspended in sets from the ceiling. Stories written by firefighter and author Lorena Williams are printed on the black layers.
As the climate warms, forest fires are becoming more frequent and catastrophic in the western US. My deep anxiety with the impacts of climate change on wilderness are emerging in this series. Unfamiliar tree forms are newly exposed. Normal greens, blues and browns are transformed. The original paintings are from burned trees from many different forest fires. In this way they represent all fires. By using fabric to represent this grove, I convey that the forests we take as permanent are in fact fragile."
Isaac Cordal, Politicians Discussing Global Warming, 2013, part of the Follow the Leaders installation, Berlin.
This Spanish Galician street artist's "miniature urban interventions" have appeared--in gutters, on top of buildings, in a puddle on the square--in various cities around the globe. His balding middle-aged white man in a gray suit represents a social stereotype associated with power and business, "those who run the global social spectrum." (Think the do-nothing "bald heads" in Mumu Fresh's song "State of Emergency" (see Music). Here the tiny resin figures huddle and discuss, ignoring the reality of water up to their noses. The surprise of size and placement adds to the wry social commentary. Cordal says, "I think we need an overdose of humor every day to survive”.
Jordan Weber, New Forest,Ancient Thrones, 2024. Weber’s sculpture, in the newly designed East Canfield Art Park in Detroit, "was unveiled in a procession led by West African drummers. The sculpture melds crowns worn by two African queens — Ranavalona III of 19th-century Madagascar, who led her kingdom’s resistance to French colonizers before being exiled, and Idia of Benin, whose military derring-do during her son’s reign in the 16th century helped fend off tribal invaders."
Located a few blocks from a large Jeep assembly factory, the sculpture is equipped with air pollution tracking devices--"real-time air monitor readings indicated through LED colored lights signaling good to hazardous using the EPA’s color system." Since the devices went in, complaints of paint fumes and other noxious odors have dropped significantly.
Weber's focus is on "helping communities of color heal from the effects of environmental and social ills, part of a growing movement called regenerative art, which seeks to revitalize links between communities and their ecosystems." The completed installation will include a raised walkway for forest bathing amid pollution-absorbing conifers.
Paolo Fanciulli, founder, and Giorgio Butini, Emily Young, et al, sculptors, La Casa dei Peschi​, Talamone, Italy, 2020. In desperate protest against illegal trawling for fish which destroys the coastal marine ecosystem, especially the sea grass habitat, Fanciulli, a Tuscan fisherman, worked with Greenpeace and the local environmental protection agency to drop concrete blocks in the area as a physical barrier for the nets. That evolved into the idea of an "underwater museum," with sculptures in Carrara marble, all donated, for a "Fish Home." The ecosystem is healing and sea creatures of all kinds, from algae and sea grass to turtles and dolphins, are returning. Acqua, by Butini, and Young Guardian, by Young.
Pam Longobardi, Anchor (Our Albatross) of steel and plastic trash, 2017, Signal Flags of Climate Change, of climate migrants' discarded life vests, 2018. This art activist's Drifters Project (2006-present) "mobilizes citizens, students, scientists, filmmakers and indigenous communities in labor-intensive cleaning of sea caves, beaches and coastlines worldwide." She then creates artworks from the recovered plastic trash to draw attention to the environmental crisis, marine plastic pollution, and its effects on humanity and all life.
Tammy West, Keep it Together, 2021, and Stay Put, 2017, "site-specific environmental art that focuses on our collective climate grief."
Keep It Together "conceptually wills climate change and the drought to end by literally tying cracked earth back together. I wanted this piece to convey the desperate situation that we are in by mimicking surgical sutures or stitches with red string and nails. If we must resort to tying our world back together, we have nothing."
Stay Put --"wishing the glacier to stay put and not melt away." Her first work of the series, it straps down part of the Mydalsjokull glacier in Iceland, working with a glaciologist from the Haskell Island Institute of Earth Science.
I like the dark humor in the titles and concepts--the childishly ineffectual attempts to "fix" a massive global problem with everyday hardware items.
Fused Together, 2023-present, partnership program between Hilltop Artists and Communities for a Healthy Bay, facilitated at local libraries by glass artists Dick Weiss and Kait Rhoads (see her work below). "Together with you, we are creating public art that will be installed across Tacoma to celebrate marine life and help raise awareness about the impacts of pollution." In 2024, images of these windows will also be installed on two water quality testing utility boxes in Tacoma.The free community workshops are still going on: "learn about local marine life and preserving the waters of the Puget Sound, while creating your own fused glass tile and contributing to a collaborative art project in a family-friendly activity suitable for ages 8 and older."
Kait Rhoads, Salish Nettles, 2018, glass, copper wire, and stainless steel. Hanging high in the Pacific Seas Aquarium atrium at the Pt. Defiance Zoo, the three giant luminous orange glass jellyfish float in shapes that portray their perpetual opening and shutting movements. The glass pieces were blown and assembled with Hilltop Artist and broader community help. The result is a "beauty that everyone owns, just like the ocean that inspired the art in the first place. My hope is to spread the message of ocean ecology and to create a community connection to the sculpture, as well as to the aquarium, Puget Sound and the entire ocean.”
Hagopianarts (female-led arts initiative in Philadelphia), Eco Mural Project, 2020. "The Eco Mural Project is a series of ecologically-themed public art pieces that have two goals: to beautify blank walls and educate the public about environmental degradation. These pieces are diligently researched and exquisitely detailed, resulting in one-of-a-kind pieces that transport viewers into an otherwise inaccessible environment. Each mural contains a QR code that can be scanned by any smartphone and links directly back to our site. There, we have a short write-up about each ecosystem and the issues that they face with links to environmental organizations." What a great idea!
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Mirror Shield Project for Water Protectors at Standing Rock ND,2016. Indigenous artist and activist Luger created "a tutorial video shared on social media inviting People from across the Nation to create mirrored shields of accessible and affordable materials for use in onsite frontline actions (against rubber bullets and water cannon assaults) and send them to the Water Protectors. The project began out of urgency when in the summer of 2016 he learned that the water of his father’s homelands on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation was under threat from the Dakota Access Pipeline. Inspired by images of women holding mirrors up to riot police in the Ukraine, the intention is to create a reflective mirror not only for a shield of protection, so that an oppressor may cause less harm, but to also utilize the oppressors' image to reflect their own oppressive violent force back to them, to remind them that we are all human, regardless of the side of the line we are on, to force the oppressor to see themselves and the harm they are causing."
Cannupa Hanska Luger, This is Not a Snake/The One Who Checks and the One Who Balances, 2020. Ceramic, fiber, steel, oil drums, concertina wire, ammunition cans, trash, found objects. "A monumental sculptural installation unfurling a grotesquely poignant winding tapestry of waste; combining the leftovers of extractive industry and capitalist exports with handcrafted ceramic, steel and fiber elements to represent industrial exploitation of Indigenous land and its minerals." The guardian figures of an imagined indigenous future are part of Luger's New Myth ethos, blending tribal, sci-fi, and handcraft elements: "gauntlets made from sports equipment and industrial felt; giant cloth headdresses that evoke futuristic college-football mascots; secondhand afghans fashioned into full-body outfits."
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Thomas Dambo, Pia the Peacekeeper, an 18-foot-tall troll made from recycled wood currently residing in Sakai Park, Bainbridge Island. This Danish artist/activist's series of installations are now to be found all over the globe. The PNW group is known as the Way of the Bird King Project (Vashon, Issaquah, West Seattle, Ballard, Portland). Dambo has always been passionate about reducing today's waste and vast overconsumption. He uses found objects and recycled materials to create these sustainable sculptures of Nordic fairytale characters, seeing them as the voice of nature who remind humans to go out and experience the natural world and to be careful stewards of it.
Andrew Boyd and Gan Golan, The Climate Ribbon Tree, 2015, a "massive public art installation and ritual space." Each person wrote their answer to the question "What do you love and hope to never lose to climate chaos?" on a ribbon and tied it to a Tree of Life structure at the Paris COP21 meeting. The idea originated in 2014 at the People’s Climate March in New York City and has been replicated multiple times around the world. Others can take a stranger's ribbon in solidarity, becoming a kind of guardian of that person's hopes and dreams.
"Collectively, these ribbons compose a kind of 'people’s treaty,' inspired in part by Northeastern Native American quahog and whelk shell wampum belts that signify the mutual exchange of trust that takes place when commitments are made between peoples."
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Christine and Margaret Wertheim, Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project, 2005-present. "At a time when living reefs are dying from heat exhaustion and our oceans are awash in plastic, the Crochet Coral Reef offers a tender impassioned response." This is a crafty/mathematical "retort to climate change, a one-stitch-at-a-time meditation on the Anthropocene," as well as a "rejoinder to a culture of doom, quietly asserting, in this 'time of response-ability,' a message of hope--what we humans can do when we work together." The irrepressible bursts of color and growth also illustrate hyperbolic geometry (negative curvature) found in nature.
In addition to the Core Collection of reefs which has been exhibited internationally beginning with the Venice Biennale 2019, the Wertheims work with communities around the world to "enable citizens to crochet their own local reefs." As of 2023, fifty Satellite Reefs have been constructed, engaging thousands of people.
TED Talk with Margaret Wertheim--Watch on YouTube
Anna Teresa Fernandez, On the Horizon, 2021. Installation of 16 6-ft. tubes filled with seawater at Ocean Beach, CA. (A light is installed at the base, and sea life has been filtered out of the water)
"Current projections show sea levels rising 6 feet by the year 2100, which the tubes’ installation at the water line demonstrated with haunting precision. You can pull up all the stats and figures (about climate change) and you go numb. The difference between looking out here and walking through the tubes and seeing your height in relation to the 6 feet of water that resides in these tubes is a moment of ‘Oh wow, that’s what it’s going to be.’” (Thanks to Mary Lyverse for this suggestion!)
Sam Van Aken, The Open Orchard, Governor Island Park, NY, 2022. "A monumental living land artwork taking the form of a public orchard comprising 102 fruit trees, The Open Orchard will act as a living archive for antique and heirloom fruit varieties that were grown in and around New York City in the past 400 years but have mostly disappeared due to climate change and the industrialization of agriculture. Using a unique grafting process, Van Aken combines multiple fruit varieties into a single tree — so different varieties grow alongside one another and the trees blossom in a rainbow of white, pink, and crimson. Fruit trees cannot be saved in seed banks and must be grown as living trees to be preserved, so this dream orchard will preserve these fruits for future generations, providing a road map for innovative techniques to maintain vital biodiversity in the face of a changing climate. Nearly 100 additional trees will be donated and planted in community gardens throughout the five boroughs."
Dustin Yellin, 10 Parts, 2015, 20 ft glasswork installation with multimedia 3-d collages made of snippets of printed material and other found objects. The apocalptic vision "bursting with wild, enigmatic stories, echoes Hieronymus Bosch, one of Yellin's primary influences. In the final, 10th part of the work "a feverish tumble of figures and objects appear to fall over the edge of the world." In loving detail, today’s chaotic world of environmental collapse due to overexploitation is on display. Yellin's Brooklyn studio was flooded by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. "I’ve been thinking about climate change for as long as I can remember, I think the most pressing issue is our inability as a species to get along, our inability to work together."
Tacoma artists (clockwise) Kate Thun, Angela Larson, Nori Kimura, Saiyare Refaei and Gloria Joy Kazuko Muhammed, If it Hits the Ground, it Hits the Sound, murals on sidewalks near storm drain catch basins, 2023. This is a City of Tacoma Environmental Services program to raise awareness of stormwater pollution. (You can help!) Untreated water from our driveways, streets and sidewalks can damage the ecosystem in the Sound. The slogan shows up in five languages, English, Khmer, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Twulshootseed, and environmentally friendly paint was used in a program to beautify as well as educate.
Project director Kal Barteski and various artists, SEAWALLS project "Artists for Oceans," Churchill, Manitoba, 2017. 18 murals were created by artists from around the world to focus on environmental issues like the plight of the polar bear, ocean health, and remote, vulnerable communities like Churchill, "polar bear capital of the world" (a tourist town that "does an amazing job of responsible tourism.") On left, Pat Perry, Mayday, right, DULK (Antonio Segura), The Last Winter, center, Aaron Li-Hill, Untitled.
Building facades by Dutch solar panel startups ZigZag Solar, Solar Visuals, Kameloen Solar, Solarix, 2018 to present. “The sun sees solar modules, we see art.” “Regular blue and black PV cells are not that attractive. These facades generate electricity, but they are also beautiful.” Their special designs (a constructive back, a layer with PV cells, then a print, and finally a glass plate) and angled placements make them as effective as roof-mounted panels and sometimes as much as 25% more effective! (Thanks to Barbara Menne for this entry idea!)
River Meschi, Mother of Waters sculpture and sand installation, 2023, Mother of Waters, and Tlaloc Tree of Life,(Aztec rain god) giclee art prints.
Featured visual artist for this year's Tacoma Ocean Fest, she uses Tibetan Buddhist, Mexican, Indian, and her own Slavic ancestral mythology and symbolism for her works. In the artist's words, "I drew Mount Tahoma as a woman, feeding her watershed with rain and rivers that flow out to the ocean in a timeless cycle. This is inspired by the Latvian concept of maete, or sacred mothers who birth different aspects of the world around us. The sand drawing references a traditional Slavic practice in which women bless a space with symbols drawn with sand on the floor. Sand drawings celebrate the temporary, and are ultimately swept up and returned to the ocean with gratitude."
Susan Beech, Wildflowers, paper, 2023. Made to illustrate an article in the Nature Conservancy Magazine, Summer 2023, "Bloom and Bust: in Wyoming, warmer springs could spell trouble for flowering plants and the wildlife that depend on the precise timing of their blossoms and berries," by Kirsten Weir. The study showed that the first flowers of spring are now blossoming an average of 17 days sooner than they had in the 1970s because of a 3.6 degree rise in temperatures. "The changing bloom cycles in Grand Teton could create an ecological mismatch for the wildlife that have adapted to depend on those plants. Plants change their flowering dates in response to the climate, but many species of insects and birds time their emergence or migration to the day length. That discrepancy could affect wildlife's survival."
This paper artist from the UK uses crepe paper dyed with tea or painted with powder paints to create her astonishingly delicate and lifelike replicas. She sees her paper flowers as more sustainable than the fresh flower industry, with its vast use of pesticides, water, and transport.
(Thanks to my sister Mary Lyverse for suggesting this artist!)
Leandro Erlich, Order of Importance, sand sculpture installation, Miami Beach, 2019. 66 life-size sand replicas of cars and trucks in a traffic jam line up along the ocean front, left to slowly degrade as a kind of relic, a reminder of our fragility and the rising sea level. The Argentinian conceptual artist comments, "the climate crisis has become an objective problem that requires immediate solutions. As an artist, I am in a constant struggle to make people aware of this reality, in particular, the idea that we cannot shrink away from our responsibilities to protect the planet."
Klaus Littmann, For Forest:the Unending Attraction of Nature,September-October 2019. A temporary art intervention composed of 300 mature native trees planted inside Worthersee Stadium, Klagenfurt, Austria. Max Peintner's drawing of 1971, The Unending Attraction of Nature, (upper left), which presents a forest as a mere exhibition object, provided his inspiration for the project.
"The installation was a clever play on our emotions when faced with what should be a familiar sight, placed in an entirely different context." It challenges our perception of the relationship between nature and humankind in the Anthropocene, serving as a memorial or warning, for "one day, we might have to admire the remnants of nature in specially assigned spaces, as is already the case with zoo animals."
After the exhibit, the trees were re-planted in a plot near the stadium with an interpretive center.
Vincent J.F. Huang, Polar Bear Hamburger, 2014. Taiwanese eco artist notable for his collaboration with the country of Tuvalu, (forecast to be the first nation to disappear due to sea level rise), and his selection as their official delegate at COP18. He caught media attention earlier due to his guerrilla-style artworks and urban installations around the world. Huang uses black humor to contemplate the consequences of human consumption and the dangers of climate change. A student's reflections:
"Human society is killing NATURE. The burger represents us as humans industrializing the world and using up our NATURAL resources and the polar bear represents the wildlife of the Earth. The bear has no choice and is sandwiched by our need to industrialize and globalize. He is being weighed down by our poor choices."
Benjamin Von Wong, The Giant Plastic Tap 2022. "Turn off the Giant Plastic Tap" is a global movement by this Canadian artist & activist to reduce the production of single-use plastics. "Single-use plastic consumption has gone up by 250-300% during the pandemic. We're incapable of processing all the plastic that we produce so we need to go back to the source and stop producing so much in the first place." Three stories tall, the work depicts a faucet pouring a river of plastic trash (gathered from the slums of Kibera in Nairobi) to the ground. The installation was constructed in Nairobi at the time of the UN gathering there to sign a global plastics resolution, but has been photographed on multiple other sites.
Jason DeCaires Taylor, The Rising Tide, 2015 Thames River, London. Loosely based on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, shire horses whose heads have been replaced with oil well pumps bear two young riders evoking "hope for future change," and two older riders in suits showing attitudes of "denial or ambivalence." (The work is visible from the Houses of Parliament--"I think we really need to start holding people accountable for what they are doing"). The ensemble appears and disappears with the river's tides. Taylor's many underwater museums and sculpture parks around the globe get over half a million visitors per year. (See Crossing the Rubicon from Museo Atlantico, Lanzarote, Spain below) Using low carbon, PH neutral materials designed to be naturally colonized, they create a habitat for marine life and help keep divers away from fragile reef areas, while exploring themes of the climate emergency and the regenerative powers of nature.
Olga Ziemska, Listen, 2003. Outdoor installation, locally reclaimed birch and plaster cast hands, at the Center of Polish Sculpture, Oronsko. “Nature is defined as anything that’s in our surrounding environment including rocks, trees, plants, and animals, but excluding humans and human creation. This definition is teaching the next generation something that is actually about a massive separation and fragmentation. I think that needs to be relooked at, redefined and corrected.”
Carrie Ziegler, Plastic Whale, 2012. Collaborative sculpture made of plastic trash, commissioned by Thurston County Public Works. Ziegler created this project when the plastic bag ban was being debated. Gathering materials (including over 10K plastic bags) with the efforts of over 900 school kids and various community groups, she formed this life-size structure which was then part of the Procession of the Species Parade in Olympia. Ziegler is currently very active with the Thurston Climate Action Team as an artist and community engagement leader.
Alejandro Durán, "Washed Up" Project, 2010-, Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve, Mexico. Despite being a protected area, global plastic trash washes up on Sian Ka'an's shores like everywhere else. Duran began to collect and color-sort the plastic, then use it create evocative temporary arrangements within the natural setting . After disassembly, the items are reused for environmental art workshops. Left: Algas (Algae), 2013. Right: Brotes (Shoots), 2014.
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Britt Freda, Vashon Audubon Bird Mural, 2020, Vashon Island, retaining wall outside the Vashon Center for the Arts. Colorful and imaginative (is that Klimt style?) renderings of local birds endangered by climate change were painted on this 10ft wall. Just beyond it is a restored meadow and wetland with aspen groves.
Terry Tempest Williams, Ben Roth, and Felicia Resor, Council of Pronghorn, 2011, St. John the Divine, NYC. Accompanying poem (see in Poetry section)
Seen as a circle of witnesses to environmental destruction, 23 pronghorn antelope skulls stand in a circle (for the 23 counties of WY), on weathered ranch fenceposts, secured to iron bases repurposed from the gas fields. "The fate of the pronghorn is our own, holding us accountable for what has been taken and for the beauty that remains. They tell the story of fracking in the American West, of a boom-and-bust economy and contaminated water…the costs of a fossil fuel economy.” (Williams) The sight of many pronghorn trapped and dying in the oil reservations of WY condemned human greed and cruelty. The installation was first set up in Jackson Hole as a “disturbance,” then was invited to St. John the Divine where "its dignity and stark beauty still haunts and inspires."
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Ruben Orozco, Bihar,2021. The title means "tomorrow" in Basque. Under cover of darkness, Orozco installed a hyperrealist fiberglass sculpture of a girl in the River Nervion in Bilbao, Spain. The girl's face is submerged during high tides, leading to questions about future rising water levels and sustainability.
