First Edition: Art + The Environment
April Newsletter
Going to keep this month’s newsletter short and sweet (well at least that’s what I’m telling myself as I begin to write this…), but in honor of Earth Day and our beautiful planet in general I thought I’d share some artists and artworks that incite introspection and action in honor of our planet.
🌊 Deep Dive: Environmental Art
This month’s edition was primarily inspired by Olafur Eliasson’s newest project - Life where he flooded (and removed some walls from) the incredibly beautiful Tadao Ando-designed Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. This work (while being a challenging logistical feat in and of itself, as are many of Eliasson’s works) involves bringing the organic, natural world, inside one of the most prestigious sanctuaries for art in the world. Ironically, while museums painstakingly work to keep organic matter (ie. mold, dust, moisture) out of museums in the name of preservation, in this work, nature is the art. Viewers are invited to walk through the building at any time of day - there aren’t any doors to keep them out, and in very 2021 fashion, the experience is live-streamed for those that can’t make it to the space.
Eliasson’s practice as a whole, aims to highlight the beauty and challenges of the natural world - one of my all-time favorites was a piece called Ice Watch, 2014 where he brought chunks of fallen glacial ice to city centers around the world in order to serve as a visual reminder of the impact of climate change on the environment. He also timed the London edition of the installation to coincide with the meeting of world leaders at a climate change conference.
Olafur Eliasson is not the only artist who addresses the topic of climate change, so I have listed a few other important artists and artworks highlighting environmental activism.
Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, 1982
The artist planted and tended to a 2-acre wheat field on a landfill in lower Manhattan, a stone’s throw away from Wall Street, the World Trade Center, and the Statue of Liberty. At the end of the project, the grain was harvested and traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called "The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger."
Mel Chin’s Revival Field, 1993-present
In the name of art, Mel Chin propagated plants into highly contained soil in order to use nature to extract heavy metals from the ground. This “Green Remediation” served as an on-site, low-tech alternative to current costly and unsatisfactory remediation methods.
His photographic work really captures the different effects humanity has on our environment. His often large-format photographs are created in series, focusing on different environmental subjects from water to oil to mines.
A recent project of Burtysnky’s involved teaming up with award-winning filmmakers for the Anthropocene Project which traveled to art museums around the world and inspired action, as viewers were confronted with tangible steps to take to reduce their impact on the environment.
Oil Fields #2, Belridge, California, USA, 2003
Gabriel Orozco’s Found Objects, specifically Sandstars, 2012
Orozco often creates installations with found objects. For the 2012 installation Sandstars, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the artist collected and arranged over 1,200 objects from the Isla Arena, Mexico trash repository. The objects were accompanied by large photographs depicting the individual objects in a studio setting. The re-contextualization makes you stop and think about trash vs. treasure and the effects of consumptionion.
Allison Janae Hamilton’s portraits and The peo-ple cried mer-cy in the storm, 2018
Allison Janae Hamilton’s work focuses on the environment and the effects on marginalized communities in particular - when it comes to natural disaster, people of color are always on the front lines. This work created for Storm King Art Center, involves a tower of tambourines on an island, symbolizing and memorializing thousands of black migrant workers killed and buried in unmarked mass graves due to two historic storms—the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 and the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928.
The peo-ple cried mer-cy in the storm, 2018
🔥 Trending
NFTs… still. For various reasons — but focusing on the ways in which I think the tool can be used for powerful artistic statements, a new favorite of mine is the NFT being auctioned off by Christie’s by model/writer/art collector, Emily Ratajkowski. The digital work is being sold in part as an effort to reclaim her image - from all those that have profited from it without her involvement - from blue-chip contemporary artist Richard Prince’s Instagram Portrait series to the media and paparazzi. By releasing this NFT, Ratajkowski will receive a portion of proceeds from every subsequent resale. I see this power move as such a clever investigation of ownership and copyright, truly a great conceptual piece, and I am all for it. (Also, if you need and/or want more context, be sure to read her article about reclaiming her image that she wrote (beautifully) for The Cut. If this sounds familiar, I also referenced it in a previous newsletter.)
Vaccines in the company of art! While museums still have closed doors in Italy, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rivoli-Torino has become a temporary vaccination site, complete with a sound installation and murals by Claudia Comte.
💸 Advisory Picks
Little Sun by Olafur Eliasson - purchasing one of these little solar-powered lights helps increase access to sun-powered, sustainable energy sources throughout the world.
Also, if you haven’t watched it already Netflix’s “Abstract” series, I really recommend the episodes on both Olafur Eliasson (S2, E1) and environmentally-focused Starchitect Bjarke Ingels (S1, E4). Both episodes are great!
👋 Parting Words…
It never ceases to amaze me how powerful art’s ability can be to stop you in your tracks. These works, for example, not only create moments of beauty and contemplation but also many of them consist of actions that result in meaningful impacts on the problems the artwork’s concepts aim to solve. Just another of the many reasons I love art! Until next time…
XX, B
P.S. Any burning art questions? Topics you are curious about? Prefer subject deep dives or market recaps in these newsletters? Please don’t hesitate to get in touch, I am always looking for feedback and fresh content for these write-ups!