This exhibition will examine the various ways that global climate change is reflected in the visual arts. Since 2006 there has been a literally explosion of exhibitions, projects and interventions on the themes of climate change, sustainability and ecological responsibility. Working with scientists, statisticians, public policy wonks, municipal officials and arts organizations they have set the protocol for this genre of art making. Artists thus have been at the vanguard of concretizing scientific, social, political and economic theory around the environment into specific projects which they have situated in venues for maximum exposure to the public.

Over the last five years organizations such as the Precipice Alliance, Greenhouse Britain, EcoArts and the Artists’ Project Earth have brought together visual artists to sound the warnings about global climate change and raise awareness through their work to inspire their fellow planetary citizens to action towards life changes that will insure a sustainable environment. Exhibitions such as Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, Safe: Design Takes on Risk, 6 Billion Perps Held Hostage and Weather Report: Art and Climate Change and ongoing projects such as the Cape Farewell project and the Institute for Figuring’s collaborative coral reef project have encouraged practical as well as aesthetic approaches to the environment.  The artists in Gaia and Global Warming: Women Artists Champion Nature are all women and each one evidences in their work an uncanny marriage of utility and aesthetics: Hope Sandrow, Peggy Diggs, Margaret and Christine Wertheim (The Institute for Figuring), Nancy Macko, and Judy Cotton.

Hope Sandrow’s work inevitably involves a direct engagement with the real world. Her contribution to this exhibition will feature documentation of her breeding of Paduan roosters and hens, an endangered species of fowl. For Sandrow her relationship to these birds revolves around human/ bird interaction, which restores the relationship of urbanized humans to sources of foods, they eat—in this case eggs. It also involves an examination of how humans often alter the behavior of species they domesticate for work, companionship or consumption, and an attempt to free the species of those human interventions. Her installation will include photographic portraits of the roosters and hens, including juxtaposition with children’s toys of other extinct species such as dinosaurs (reminding us of the primordial ancestors of extant species) and a life-feed webcam into the yard and coop where her chickens roam in South Hampton.

There has been much discussion of the social dislocations that would be a consequence of any type of global warming.
Peggy Diggs an artist working in Williamstown MA began to think about the experience of living as a refugee, moving from place to place with only a few belongings on her back. She had begun to think seriously about climate change and preparing for disaster. That meditation became a project called WorkOut. The concept originated from a story Diggs read in The Observer International in 2004, by Mark Townsend and Paul Harris on the coming effects of climate change where major cities in Europe would be submerged in the sea as a Siberian climate is ushered in by 2020. Keeping in mind Townsend and Harris’s vision of nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting, Diggs wanted to create a solution to the need to live in tight spaces, perhaps with objects serving multiple functions, and definitely having to be mobile. In collaboration with prisoners at Graterford Prison outside Philadelphia, Diggs hit on the solution of a piece of compact, flexible furniture, a cardboard desk and storage unit with movable parts painted in five colors and decorated with images. Diggs would exhibit versions of WorkOut and also come to do a workshop at the Arts Association with the museum’s public.

Margaret and Christine Wertheim are known best for their Hyberbolic Crochet Coral Reef was initiated by their organizational entity The Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles. This project was initiated not only to highlight the mathematical order and underpinning of earthly creation but also to heighten awareness of the condition of the Great Barrier Reef along the coast of Queensland, Australia. The Hyperbolic Crochet Cactus Garden, to be featured in Gaia and Global Warming, was created by Margaret and Christine Wertheim, with contributions by Sarah Simons, Evelyn Hardin, Marianne Midelburg, Helen Bernasconi, Anitra Menning, Spring Pace, David Orozco, Shari Porter, Beverly Griffiths, Pamela Stiles. As the IFF notes: “The impetus for this project was to evoke in wool the delicate wonder of living cactii. The forms on show here were inspired by real desert ecologies, and by the techniques of hyperbolic crochet developed by mathematician Dr Daina Taimina at Cornell University. Like living cactii, crochet cactii are found in a dazzling variety of "species." Although the processes that produce these pieces are algorithmic, every individual crafter who comes to the project brings to bear on the age-old forms of nature their own aesthetic powers. The result is a "living" woolen ecology that, like a real cactus garden, continues to grow and expand.”

Nancy Macko will exhibit aspects of her on-going project, Hive Universe, which was initiated in 1994, through which Macko explores a mythology of bee priestesses based on her research into the role and place of honeybees all over the world. The notion of a culture of bee priestesses resonated with the ideas of feminist utopias, and Macko has used painting, printmaking, digital media, photography, video, and installation to create a visual language that examines and responds to issues related to eco-feminism, nature, and ancient matriarchal cultures, as well as to explore her interest in mathematics and prime numbers, in particular in order to make explicit the implicit connections between nature and technology. Macko’s work also is prescient given the current crisis around the fate of honeybees, the collapse of colonies worldwide and the implications for agriculture. A special feature of the installation will be Macko’s compilation of bee stories that she collected in various parts of the globe.

Judy Cotton’s Jackson Nature Trail-Duck Walk-Fifty Years from Now—Snake River is a work in the installation that engages the landscape. She will exhibit the elements of a proposal to create an installation of her now signature yellow rubber ducks (that she has appropriated from dime stores) along the Snake River in and around Jackson. Each duck would be constructed of material that represents the particular challenge to the landscape posed by global warming and ecological irresponsibility: from the melting of the polar ice cap, to the devastations of oil spills and other disasters, to the consideration of sustainable energy. The effectiveness of the project will rest in the contrast that Cotton creates between the almost ridiculous and ubiquitous cuteness of the duck forms and the deadly seriousness of the issues that each prototype duck represents.