Category: Environmental Art
How to Be Like the Glaciers Melting
January 12, 2017Guest contributor Leslie Birch, 2014-2015 LandLab Resident Artist
A few years ago I sat at my computer reading the latest on the demise of the glaciers in the Arctic. I was angry with the polluting corporations, fed up with the greed of the oil industry, disgusted by people’s consumption, and alienated by a government ruled by lobbyists. I felt frozen, as if calamity had already happened; some days I was even bleak about the future. My home thermostat was set to 69, two of my computers were on, I was surrounded by electronic parts for a project and I was…
Climate Change Art Spotlight: Jill Pelto
December 15, 2016By Christina Catanese, Director of Environmental Art
Looking back over the year of environmental art at the Schuylkill Center, one of the highlights of 2016 was our gallery show, Going Up: Climate Change + Philadelphia. Along with the work of seven other artists exploring the various facets of climate change, this show included a new work by Maine artist Jill Pelto which was created specially for this exhibition, called Philadelphia Sea Level Rise Scenarios.
Pelto herself is both an artist and a scientist, and uses her watercolor paintings to communicate scientific data in a more visually compelling way. Starting with…
Call for Art: Community
December 8, 2016Jenny Ryder, Environmental Art & PR Intern
With the dawn of a new year approaching, it’s as good a time as ever to commit or re-commit yourself to new year resolutions and opportunities for the future.
At the Schuylkill Center, we are committed to using our various platforms and resources to help inspire meaningful connections between people and nature—whether that be through our Nature Preschool, here on the blog, in our gallery, or just a simple retweet. As we renew our commitment to the planet and our ecosystem this year, we must necessarily renew our commitment to all of those…
Climate Change: Making the Global Personal Through Art
November 3, 2016 By Christina Catanese, Director of Environmental Art
What does climate change mean for Philadelphia? As a large, complex, global process, it’s not an easy concept to wrap our minds around.
As you might expect, climate models project pretty clearly that Philly will face a future that is hotter and wetter.
According to CUSP – the Climate & Urban Systems Partnership , scientists predict that in our region we could experience as many as three additional weeks of days over 90° by the 2020s. All that heat not only is unpleasant, but can also lead to serious health risks. CUSP also…
Art + Time at the Schuylkill Center: a 2017 wall calendar
October 13, 2016By Christina Catanese, Director of Environmental Art
One of the most important aspects of environmental art is leaving time for nature to respond to an art work. Change is a constant in the natural world, and when artists venture outside the controlled setting of the studio or gallery, art must be responsive to change, time, and seasons.
Indeed, many environmental art works are not complete until nature has had time to respond and artists have had time to understand and reconcile change in the work. Stacy Levy’s Rain Yard needs rain to fall for the collaboration with water to happen;…
Reading Under the Bark
September 20, 2016By guest contributor Jim Frazer
I’ve been trying to remember what led me to photograph the engraved tracks of bark beetles. I believe that really it was just curiosity about looking for lines and patterns in nature which first drew my attention to the etched pathways of the beetle larvae. Once I became aware of them, they seemed to be everywhere in the woods. In an effort to understand what I was looking at, I did some research, and found out that the beetles’ increased range and activity was due to warming.
Since climate change seemed to come on us…
Education, climate change, and the “fierce urgency of now”
July 7, 2016By Mike Weilbacher, Executive Director
When a child graduates high school, the environmental education movement strives to make sure that student is environmentally literate—she understands how the world works, maybe even takes actions to improve environmental systems.
As the climate quickly changes, those graduates need to know about global warming. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a completely different context, referred to “the fierce urgency of now,” and environmental educators feel that urgency, as weather is warming, seasons are shifting, oceans are rising, glaciers are shrinking, the icecaps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species are disappearing at rates faster than…
Bryophilia: A Moss Love Story
June 2, 2016By Christina Catanese, Director of Environmental Art
I’ve had a moss fascination as long as I can remember. Friends find me difficult to hike with, as I’m often hanging back crouched down over a mossy growth. I have taken more photos of moss than most people would probably find reasonable. In college, I did a research project on the ‘moss line’ in a montane stream – the bright line I observed where moss stopped growing on the creekside rocks. I own more than one piece of moss jewelry.
Why moss? I think I’m fascinated by how often overlooked these life…
Art in a Changing Climate
April 28, 2016By Christina Catanese, Director of Environmental Art
Bill McKibben wrote, in a 2005 essay on climate change and art, “But oddly, though we know about it, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?”
Climate change is abstract, cognitively complex, with no clear single villain; dialogue around climate change often induces self-defensiveness, the steps needed to respond require long time horizons, and many of the victims are distant, in either space or time. More so than many other environmental issues,…
Time + Art, Part 2: As an Anniversary Approaches
March 16, 2016By Catalina Lassen, Art + PR Intern
As spring bounds in again, another year has come and gone, and almost a year has passed since our LandLab artists in residence installed a variety of exciting environmentally minded artworks last April. This cycle of a year signifies not only an anniversary, but is also a reminder of the changes that have occurred during the time in-between. As far as the art of LandLab goes, the works have been activated by nature, shifting as the seasons do. Back in November we took a look at the progress of one of these installations,…
