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This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world stretching boundaries with new artists, new audiences and new technology.
Visitors to the Hammer Museum’s show “Breath(e) Toward Climate and Social Justice” will be greeted by powerful works portraying the widespread impact of ecological degradation: photos of citizens in Flint, Mich., waiting for clean water, a painting of a fish created out of spilled crude oil and contaminated sediment.
But increasingly, museums are realizing that presenting artwork that addresses the climate crisis is not enough — they also must consider their own impact on the environment.
So, Hammer visitors won’t know that most of the art items were shipped by ground or sea, rather than air, resulting in far less carbon dioxide emissions. Or that the exhibition catalog was printed using FSC paper, which comes from forests managed in sustainable ways, and wrapped in translucent paper rather than the typical plastic shrink wrap.
“It would absolutely be hypocritical for us to put on a show about climate change without questioning our implication in climate change,” said Glenn Kaino, a Los-Angeles-based conceptual artist and co-curator of the show, which runs through Jan 5.
The Hammer exhibition is part of “PST Art: Art and Science Collide,” a series of events taking place through mid-February 2025 at about 70 museums, science institutions and other spaces across Southern California.
Museums and galleries have long shown artworks related to the climate crisis, but in recent years, there has been more of an urgency for directors and curators to look at the environmental cost of heating, cooling and lighting their buildings and packing, shipping and exhibiting their shows. That also includes examining the ecological toll of using imported materials or artists from distant shores rather than local artwork and artists.
In part, the pandemic jump-started the process; people had time to think about issues that were pressing but difficult to focus on during the busyness of everyday life. Within the art community, discussions arose about collaborative actions geared toward the climate crisis.
What would it “look like to actually be able to come together and feel like we are empowered to do something — and imagine a future we can live in, rather than feeling this kind of existential dread?” said Laura Lupton, an art and climate consultant, who helped develop and coleads the Climate Impact Program that is part of the PST Art event. She co-founded the nonprofit Artists Commit in 2020.
As an industry, the art sector is far from the largest carbon emitter but it has an outsize impact because of how it operates: typically in large buildings with strict climate and humidity requirements.
Museums and other buildings devoted to art, “are some of the most energy-consuming buildings in a city,” said Caitlin Southwick, the founder of Ki Culture, a company that works on coaching, training and providing services linked to culture and sustainability,
Some changes can happen at the individual facility level — as one example, many museums are replacing incandescent lightbulbs with LED lighting, which uses far less energy and lasts much longer.
The Nevada Museum of Art in Reno — the most rapidly warming city in the country — has been focused on sustainability. It estimates that its carbon emissions will be reduced by 19 percent when solar panels are installed in a few months, said Apsara DiQuinzio, the museum’s senior curator for contemporary Art.
In addition, a major exhibition opening in March 2026 on the environment will include 190 artists. To reduce transportation and other environmental and financial costs connected to shipping art works, more than half of the 250 items to be displayed will be from the museum’s permanent collection, DiQuinzio added.
But broader transformation necessitates an industrywide approach.
The Gallery Climate Coalition, based in London, started in 2020 as a group of 1,500 arts-related organizations worldwide seeking to reduce the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030. It is primarily funded by individual donations.
The coalition recently introduced a carbon calculator to help museums and galleries track and reduce their carbon emissions.
Alex Klein, head curator and director of curatorial affairs at the Contemporary Austin, said her museum tested the calculator, along with other museums, and found it useful.
“It helped us to start to think through what does it mean to track carbon?” she said. “Our ambitions in the future would be to have a carbon budget for our shows.”
The Contemporary Austin was one of six museums awarded a pilot Climate Action grant in 2023 from the Teiger Foundation, which supports contemporary arts curators. The Climate Action program, included up to $20,000 per recipient — now $25,000 — and a year of working with a climate consultant.
“Curators are so desperate to engage on climate change,” said Larissa Harris, the foundation’s executive director.
The Contemporary Austin used some of its grant to track carbon for its exhibition “Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses,” showing through Dec. 8. The exhibition of the California artist, among other things, examines the impact humans have on their ecosystem and the impermanence of both the built environment and nature.
It will travel to four other museums in the United States and Europe through 2027; they have all agreed to track certain lines of carbon emissions “so that at the end, we will have a base line for the field at large,” Klein said. “Because you can’t really know how to change things unless you know what needs to be changed.”
For most museums, the energy used to control the building’s temperature and humidity to preserve artworks is the largest part of their climate footprint, Southwick said.
Since the 1960s and 1970s, when HVAC systems became widely used, museums have largely held to a strict standard on the best climate for artworks: 65 degrees plus or minus two degrees and 55 percent relative humidity plus or minus 5, Southwick said.
Those numbers became “the holy grail,” she said, and if museums wanted to borrow items from other museums, they had to typically agree to those climate controls 24 hours a day.
But all that is being questioned now and many other museums in Europe and the United States and their insurers are re-examining the issue. The Bizot Group, an organization of the directors of the world’s largest museums, last year issued new green guidelines noting that it is now known that “museum collections survive exceptionally well under much wider climatic conditions than traditionally assumed.”
Other ideas to lower carbon emissions include extending the time traveling exhibitions stay at one museum from a typical 12 weeks to no less than six months, so there is less packing, shipping, travel and building of new installations, said Anne Kraybill, chief executive of the Art Bridges Foundation.
Museums also need to work with artists to discuss sustainability, said Alexa Steiner, co-founder of Rute Collaborative consulting, and the climate consultant used by the Teiger Foundation. That can include discussing the types of materials an artist uses and the potential effect on the environment, how the work will be installed, and even the number of times the artist, if not local, will need to visit.
Increasingly, artists are aware that they don’t want to just depict climate change but to use their creativity to combat it. Haley Mellin, a New Jersey-based artist and founder of the nonprofit conservation organization Art into Acres, said she shifted to painting outdoors about five years ago.
“This creates a seasonal studio without utility bills, climate control or studio rent, and my art is less of a large physical production,” she said. “I can paint outdoors and clean up easily, then put the paintings in my carrier and walk to work.”
Lan Tuazon, a Chicago-based artist, has a sculpture installation in the Hammer exhibition called “Over Your Head and Under the Weather.”
It is built with different types of reconfigured plastic and other materials and includes an industrial shredder. Visitors will have the opportunity to bring their own plastic to the Hammer and watch as it is shredded to be turned into future works by Tuazon.
The climate crisis has to be addressed by artists and museums, she says. But with her work, she wants to give people the power to realize they can make a difference.
“I think that there are accessible, everyday, small things that absolutely impact climate change, “ she said.
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