THE ART OF CHANGE
Artists change the way we perceive the world. They show us new ways to appreciate life -- new places to find beauty -- new ideas to consider. Some artists want to do more than change our minds, they are out to change the world.
Art Works for Change is an organization of artists and social change leaders that produce a series of acclaimed traveling museum exhibitions focused on social and environmental themes.
Photo: Courtesy of Artworks for Change.
Founded in 2008 by Randy Jayne Rosenburg, Art Works for Change features both emerging and renowned artists to promote awareness, provoke dialogue, and inspire action to create positive change in human rights, social justice, gender equity, environmental stewardship, and sustainability. One show, entitled “Nature’s Toolbox,” for example, brings together works by artists whose work celebrates biodiversity.
Photo: Courtesy of Bios Design Collective. Dissipative System. Installation by Charles Lee.
“Dissipative System,” by Charles Lee, uses thermochromatic tiles to regulate heat and curved smart solar control glass to regulate light transmission. It becomes lighter, to reflect more light in high temperatures, and darker, to absorb more heat in cool temperatures, just as many fish, reptiles, amphibians, and crustaceans do naturally.
Photo: Courtesy of LetUbeU. The Waribashi Project.
Artist Donna Keiko Ozawa collected 180,000 used chopsticks (aka waribashi) to call attention to the blight of deforestation. Ozawa’s Nature’s Toolbox piece, “The Waribashi Project,” uses 90,000 alone. Her dedication to the issue is evidenced, among other things, by the fact that she washed each and every chopstick by hand.
Photo: Jen Zieche. “Our Waste of Time”.
Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1, the experimental arm of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, oversees “Expo 1: New York,” focused on ecological economic and cultural challenges.
One installation, by Olafur Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist, called “Your Waste of Time,” is a gallery/freezer filled with 800-year-old chunks of ice that had fallen from Iceland’s largest glacier. They are left to melt when the show is over.
Photo: Charles Roussel. Rain Room.
Another installation, called “Rain Room,” by rAndom International, lets visitors “control the weather” as they walk through a room of falling water while staying dry. The installation is meant to be experienced first-hand, through all five senses, including touch. See our earlier post, Not Just a Box of Rain.
Photo: Courtesy of Best Climate Practices.
Cape Farewell collaborates with the world's leading climate scientists and some of our most influential artists to create a cultural response to climate change. Science offers facts, while art tells stories.
Founded in 2003, by British artist David Buckland, participants have included artists such as Antony Gormley, who cast himself in ice and then left his replica to melt.
Photo: Courtesy of Best Climate Practices.
“Unfold”, a multimedia exhibition is now at the Nanjing University of the Arts. One of its highlights is “Polar Diamond” by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey. They created a diamond from a polar-bear bone.
Cape Farewell has run a series of ten expeditions, over the past ten years, including adventures in the high Arctic and the Andes. This year, the expedition explored northern Scotland, the Hebrides and the Shetland islands.
Photo: Courtesy of Climate Science and Policy. Cape Farewell.
In May 2013 Art Works for Change staged the first climate/culture exhibition in Beijing in partnership with the University of the Arts London. Another is planned for Russia in 2014.
Photo: Dr. Roxane Anderson. Sundew.
Creative Scotland is supporting another Cape Farewell initiative, Sexy Peat, an exhibition of contemporary visual art, in partnership with Inverness-based Highland Print Studio. Sexy Peat celebrates the ecology and heritage of the Lewis blanket bog on Lewis Isle in the Scottish Hebrides.
Scotland’s bogs act as a natural store of potentially harmful carbon. Their peat stores more than 3,000 megatons of carbon, which, if leaked into the atmosphere, would pose a serious threat to the environment.
Commissioned artists include:
Photo: Courtesy of Untitled Magazine. Moma PS1.
The art of change is something a growing number of people are eager to experience.
Last January Berlin artist Haus der Kulturen der Welt began “The Anthropocene Project”, a two-year culture programme that considers the human impact on the natural world.
In October, Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, one of the largest in North America, will host “Carbon 14,” a Cape Farewell art exhibition and four-month programme of plays, talks and seminars about climate change.
Read about the art and beauty of Change all this week, as it relates to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact, including New Messages are Changing Worlds, How to Change Your Life & World, and Beautiful New Changed Realities.
Get busy and enter the BN Competitions, Our theme this week is Beautiful Change. Send in your images and ideas. Deadline is 9.29.13.
