Contemporary Artists Bring the Realities of Climate Change into Focus

In 2023, there were 399 disasters linked to natural hazards, according to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. These events affected 93.1 million people and resulted in $202.7 billion in damages. These figures—millions and billions—are nearly impossible to fathom. This may explain why climate journalist Mary Annaïse Heglar has written, “For too long, the climate fight has been limited to scientists and policy experts…When I survey the field, it’s clear that what we desperately need is more artists.”

While quantitative data may feel abstract and detached from human experience, art can convey the visceral and emotional realities behind the numbers. For instance, consider the difference between merely reading a statistic about the most catastrophic flood in 2023, which displaced nearly 44,800 people, and experiencing multimedia artist Samara Golden’s installation that showed in 2020 at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. “Upstairs at Steve’s” reconstructs a post-disaster, coastal community featuring sandy dunes strewn with patio furniture, children’s toys, and unhinged doors. The floor-to-ceiling mirrors integrate the viewers’ reflection into the scene, placing them in the center of this destruction.

Similarly, we can find out from Googling that rising sea levels could result in floodwaters inundating land currently inhabited by 300 million people by 2050. But how does that compare with viewing Tiffany Chung’s large-scale floating architectural models, stored in a jar: monsoon, drowning fish, color of water, and the floating world (2010–2011), included in “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice” at the Hammer Museum in L.A. last year? For this work, Chung designed over 100 miniature models of houseboats and boats, based on extensive research into communities in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and India that have endured severe flood-related climate crises for generations. These floating farmhouses, clinics, and vertical gardens illustrate the dire realities of ongoing and anticipated environmental conditions, while proposing practical innovations for resilient living in flood-prone areas.

In other words, contemporary artists are heeding Heglar’s call to join the climate movement. Many are increasingly foregrounding humans’ responsibility for the climate crisis and visualizing the consequences of the resulting catastrophes. By depicting houses, roads, and other manmade structures affected by fires, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes, they make the incomprehensible scale of climate change immediate and personal. As poet and writer Guy Davenport wrote in 1982, “Art is always the replacing of indifference by attention.”

Just as the Impressionists used natural imagery to represent interiority and the pleasure and pain of memory, today’s artists seek to imbue the living world with the gravity of our environmental emergency. Often, these artists refuse complacency and encourage viewers to take action. “Art can go beyond pointing out our doomed future,” Chung said, in an interview with Artsy. “And instead offer digestible lessons that might lead to hope and action.”

James Casebere’s surreal architectural photographs also exemplify this approach. The New York–based artist builds intricate tabletop models, which he meticulously lights and photographs. The resulting images depict quasi-architectural objects often rendered in rich, saturated colors and surrounded by ultra-reflective water. According to Casebere, the vibrant hues are intended to temper the anxiety produced by the water levels and the precariousness of the structures. “We need to stay focused on the climate but in a way that inspires constructive action, which requires a certain presence of mind,” he said in an interview.

While Casebere has engaged with built environments and extreme weather throughout his career, his focus has shifted in recent years. “In earlier work, it wasn’t about man’s role in causing climate change; now, that’s the main subject, and I’m constantly thinking about how we can moderate our impact,” he said. His exhibition last year with Sean Kelly Gallery, “Seeds of Time,” featured designs inspired by sustainable, socially responsible architecture. For instance, the modular, candy-colored structures in Balconies (2023) and Stairs (2023) loosely mimic drawings of a low-income housing project by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Balkrishna Doshi. The ziggurat-shaped, low-emission stove in Chulah Cookstove (2024) is derived from a design by activist and architect Yasmeen Lari.

Brooklyn-based artist Josh Kline is similarly interested in the ways that environmentalism intersects with social equity. Through installation, video, sculpture, and photography, he addresses some of the most urgent issues of our age: technological automation, the erosion of the public sphere, and the threat of environmental collapse.

In Transnational Finance (2019), on view in his recent exhibition “Climate Change,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, a parallelogram-shaped vitrine displayed a skyline of dollhouse-size legislative buildings molded from mud. As an ice block placed alongside the skyscrapers melts, the rising water line threatens to drown the buildings. The 16mm film Adaptation (2019–22) animates this scene, depicting essential workers as scuba divers navigating a submerged city. Elsewhere in the exhibition, a series of heated steel stands displayed structures carved from soy wax—a house, a church, and a shopping complex—that gradually melted, disappearing down a drain at the bottom of the basin. In these works, Kline materializes the impacts of rising temperatures and sea levels and critiques the industries and institutions responsible for the destruction.

Francesca Gabbiani’s densely layered paper collages also feature buildings and environments in various states of destruction and disrepair. Billowing plumes of ash obstruct the charred remains of highway signs, and flaming palm trees throw sparks across acrid orange skylines. Elsewhere in her canvases, shores glow with a seemingly radioactive phosphorescence, and abandoned concrete swimming pools and burnt-out cars are overgrown with plant life. “It’s not nature impinging upon us but us impinging upon nature,” Gabbiani said in an interview with Artsy. “Depicting events like fires is one way of drawing attention to what Mother Nature is trying to tell us she needs.”

Depending on the series, the fragility of Gabbiani’s chosen material reflects either the vulnerability of the human or the more-than-human world—an apt manifestation of their interdependence. In the cut paper compositions comprising her series “Vague Terrains/ Urban Fuckups,” sprawling monochrome vines, brambles, and bushes overtake derelict stairways and tangled powerlines. In her ongoing series “Mutations,” her signature flame-licked palm trees blaze like Roman candles against smoldering hillsides, creating an ash-black atmosphere. Elsewhere, the skeletal remains of charred palms and collapsed signs and structures are rendered in black paper against radioactive orange skies, as in Spectacle IV (2019).

Jessie Homer French’s pastoral, narrative paintings have a similar flatness to Gabbiani’s collages, and she casts nature in a similarly sympathetic yet resilient light. For the self-taught octogenarian, plants and animals find a way to thrive amid the desolation: Milk-white flowers bloom from the scorched soil; coyotes circumnavigate fences; trout leap over levees. The Texas Fires (2024) depicts flames advancing toward a longhorn collapsed in the grass, and Tilapia Die-off in the Salton Sea (2022) features a cluster of pale fish corpses in brown water. Both paintings raise questions about how much longer these conditions can persist.

In her hand-stitched “mapestries,” Homer French charts the intersection between faultlines and human infrastructure, from roads to cities to power plants. In Earthquake Faults (2011), strips of red fabric labeled with the names of five different faults surround a copse of skyscrapers crisscrossing the major highways that lead into L.A. Her various paintings of funerals and cemeteries, cross-sectioned to reveal the bodies in the graves, become even more foreboding when viewed alongside the geological fissures, flames, and encroaching wildlife. “I can’t tell you the story,” Homer French said in an interview, of the painting’s environmental implications. “It’s about what you think and feel when you look at them.”