As the year progresses, we will see many campus institutions respond to Smith’s “Year on Climate Change.” The “Fragile Earth” installation, located in the Nixon Gallery and running through November 10, is one example of the Smith College Art Museum’s answers to this timely query.
Following up on the “Plastic Entanglements” traveling exhibition showcased last spring, the installation “features a selection of works from the SCMA collection created between the early 1970s and mid-2000s that focus on the intersection of human life and our environment,” per the description on the museum’s website.
Aprile Gallant, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs and the Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, put together the installation around the “loose theme” in order to invite as many perspectives as possible from within the museum’s own collection.
Stephen Hannock, who graduated from Hampshire and lived and worked in the Pioneer Valley for many years, is featured with his 1994 painting “The Oxbow, after Church, after Cole, Flooded: 1979-1994 (Flooded River for the Matriarchs, E. and A. Mongan).” Based on a well-known historic painting of the local landmark, the artist inserts his own unique experience of that environment by infusing stream-of-consciousness writing into the tenderly rendered landscape.
Xing Danwen offers a critical but no less personal response to her environment in her 2002 piece “disCONNEXION b4”, photographing the landfills of Guangdong Province, China that were filled with electronic waste. A provocative image of discarded keyboards and bubble-wrap, tinted in solemn blue, grey, and green tones, asks the viewer to consider what actually happens to the devices that they discard, making that which is often out of sight something they can’t help but confront.
The stated theme of the “Fragile Earth” installation is not confined just to the Nixon Gallery, but touches the entire museum. Emma Chubb, Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 Curator of Contemporary Art, acquired pieces along a similar theme for the Contemporary Art Gallery, though not directly related to the installation.
“Scalar Scalar (#3 Gulf of Mexico-Extraction-Black)”, by artist Torkwase Dyson, contemplates the infrastructure related to oil extraction in a painting based on her perspective when going deep sea diving in the Gulf of Mexico. The circular shape, deep black hue, and structural geometric lines of the work draw you into the harmful phenomenon and ask you to contemplate the consequences for those most affected by such uses of natural resources, such as climate migrants, Black communities, and communities of color.
While Dyson’s work is not officially part of the “Fragile Earth” installation, it shows how engaging with that theme in one area of the museum can put other, purportedly unrelated works in a different context. A museum attendee may see even a piece they have viewed before in a new light.
“Having a themed year, it makes you look at something you’ve seen in a different context in a completely new way,” says Gallant. “It’s a topic that reverberates throughout the entire building.”
It seems fitting to ask, then: what is the role of art amid this campus-wide conversation on the threat of climate change?
Chubb, acknowledging the difficulty of balancing the aesthetic beauty of art with the dire nature of climate change and climate disaster, expressed hope for long-term empowerment beyond the anxiety and futility which many people feel in response to this global threat.
“Sometimes when we talk about climate change it can feel really overwhelming and hard to make it feel like anything we do has any real impact.” In a year that will almost certainly involve difficult conversations about the future of our planet, she asks, “If we care really deeply about this, how can we not just shut down but actually translate that into action in some way?”
By viewing the pieces by Hannock, Xing, and Dyson, one might argue that the art museum’s contributions to the current conversations around climate change are fortifying the viewer with the heart and the strength to sustain dialogue and action long after Smith’s “Year on Climate Change” ends in May.
