Weather Report: Art & Climate Change

SEPTEMBER 14 - DECEMBER 21, 2007 -- "Weather Report: Art and Climate Change" is an exhibition curated by internationally renowned critic, art historian, and writer Lucy R. Lippard. It is a collaboration between the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and EcoArts.

“We have the highest density of climate scientists in the world in the Boulder-to-Broomfield corridor,” said Marda Kirn, who runs EcoArts, an interdisciplinary arts organization here. Her group is a driving force behind “Weather Report: Art and Climate Change,” an ambitious new art show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. “We have buildings full of climate scientists,” she added, as if climatology Ph.D.’s were stacked like rolls of paper towels at Costco.

For the show dozens of artists, including Agnes Denes, Mary Miss, Subhankar Banaejee, Andrea Polli, Joel Sternfeld, Iain Baxter and Chris Jordan, were asked to join with scientists to create pieces about climate change. Some of the artists had been collaborating with scientists for years; Ms. Kirn matched other artists with scientists from the Boulder area. “The artists had to be very specific about the questions they wanted to ask and the research they were doing,” she said. “Matching them with scientists was almost like setting up dates.”

Her idea — to create an interdisciplinary show on global warming — enticed the art critic Lucy Lippard to step into the curator’s role for the first time in 15 years. “It’s a killer — it’s the hottest topic, so to speak,” said Ms. Lippard, 70, who in her long career has championed Conceptual Art, public art and feminism in books including “The Pink Glass Swan” and “The Lure of the Local.”

Read the rest here.