WHAT
Artworks of any discipline, including:
Visual, performance, sound, poetry, digital, architectural, fiber, etc...
Interdisciplinary works are encouraged
Collaborations (submit as a team)
WHO
Young artists in the early stages of their careers
Non-college students, current students, post-graduates, young professionals
Welcoming artists of all backgrounds and experiences
Submissions are open through February 11, 2021
All works will be presented online – If you have an artwork and aren't sure how to present it online, reach out to us! We'd love to think creatively with you.
Exhibition opens in March 2021
This exhibition is part of a curatorial project that begins with the question:
What’s missing from mainstream dialogues about climate crises?
This digital exhibition will amplify the voices of early-career artists on the complex and nuanced experiences of living in times of climate crisis. Environmental destabilization is becoming more and more visible each year, yet much of its impact remains invisible, projected, obscured, distant, or so gradual that its progression can be difficult to witness except over long periods of time. Even visible impacts of climate crises can be dismissed as part of the status quo or ignored in favor of entrenched narratives of linear progress or human dominance over the planet and its resources.
To identify a guiding topic for the exhibition’s call for submissions, we held online discussions and collected some responses from within the Gallatin community. We hoped to gather insight on what climate-related issues, questions, and experiences were at the forefront of peoples’ minds. We heard about the tension between visible waste in cities and a lack of knowledge of where this waste goes. We heard terms like “planned obsolescence” and “just transition”. Many contributors questioned how individuals can effect change through their personal choices when 100 corporations generate more than 70% of global emissions, or when governments fail to implement overdue regulations. We read responses from participants about their own distance from the impacts of climate crises and their environmental privilege, contrasted with their awareness of the environmental injustices enacted on BIPOC and poor communities around the globe, particularly in the global South. We spoke about increasingly-visible “slow” effects of climate crises such as sea level rise, average temperature variations, and climate migration. People shared that they find hope in art-making, young politicians and activists, and natural organisms and ecosystems.
The call for submissions theme – “investigating visible and invisible experiences of climate crises” – encapsulates these beginning strands of questioning and observation, which artists can apply broadly to the ways they might bear witness to, reveal, resist, complicate, question, or imagine climate crises past, present, and future. Our starting questions include:
How can artists make climate crises visible in ways that move beyond documentation and transform knowledge into a deeper kind of knowing?
How might they articulate the unseen relations and interactions that connect human and non-human entities?
How do they grapple with the emotional resonance and sensorial residues of living in a changing environment?
How can we envision or generate more equitable, habitable futures within the context of climate destabilization?
Artists and their works can expand on these questions, propose solutions, or consider these topics more abstractly as stimuli for creative production. The interpretation, as is the world, is yours to hold.
– Ellie New, Jasmine Buckley, and Troy Gibbs-Brown
The Gallatin Galleries is an exhibition space that serves Gallatin students, alumni, faculty, and the broader community through shows that engage in conversations taking place in the arts as well as as in the academic, social, and political spheres. The Gallery works to expand the dialogue of ideas with the shows it hosts and invites students and faculty to see the space as a site of exploration of ideas, practices, and creative forms.
WetLab is a developing art-science curatorial endeavor spearheaded by Professors Eugenia Kisin and Karen Holmberg. The project explores porous boundaries between art and science and is growing into a physical center for community exchange and artistic and curatorial experimentation in New York City.