Just a few weeks ago, I was standing inside a museum in Los Angeles – the Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM) in the city of Monterey Park – becoming surprisingly entranced by a short art film narrated by a salmon. The fish, a Chinook salmon, spoke about its ancestral habitat in the Pacific Northwest’s Snake River and its connection to the Indigenous people who once sustainably caught it. The 12-minute film, Reciprocal Sacrifice (https://vimeo.com/891908064), by L.A.-based Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo, is at once beautifully meditative and a call to action, the action being the un-damming of the river and the restoration of vital habitat for the fish.
Caycedo’s video work is included in VPAM’s show We Place Life at the Center / Situamos la vida en el centro (https://vincentpriceartmuseum.org/exhibitions-we-place-life.html) (running through March 1, 2025), an exhibition that puts forth a captivating vision of the interplay of art and environmental-justice activism. Curated by the museum’s Joseph Valencia, the rousing exhibition centers the work of community-focused groups (in California, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil) that are fighting to heal ecosystems. Not to be missed are Caycedo’s vibrant works from her Mineral Intensive Drawings series, which portray haunting landscapes ruptured by extractive industries scratching away to find materials like zinc, chromium, iron and titanium.
The previous day, I also visited L.A.’s Hammer Museum, where the group exhibition Breath(e) (https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2024/breathe-toward-climate-and-social-justice) runs through January 5, 2025. It’s another compelling new show that directly addresses the way that fossil-fuel-caused climate change, coupled with habitat loss, is reshaping our planet, making our tiny blue marble in the vast universe less hospitable to life for ourselves and for our fellow creatures. Co-curated by artist Glenn Kaino and guest curator Mika Yoshitake, the show finds cross-connections between the social justice and the environmental justice movements, showcasing artists like Garnett Puett, Mel Chin, Tiffany Chung and Cannupa Hanska Luger, whose futuristic installation Sovereign – featuring suits “made to protect Indigenous space travellers” as the artist puts it – welcomes visitors in the Hammer’s lobby space. “The fight for change, at times, is just like breathing,” writes Kaino in the show’s catalogue. “If we do not think about it, we can forget about the immediacy of its power and importance.”
Both shows are part of “PST ART: Art & Science Collide (https://pst.art/en/)”, the latest Getty initiative supporting new exhibitions at more than 70 arts institutions across Southern California, all of which focus on the intersections of these two worlds.
But while museum shows about the environment can shine a light on pressing issues, they also have their own carbon footprint. Gallery walls may be a blank canvas, but arts institutions are not a blank slate when it comes to the climate. They depend on energy to stay at the right temperature, transport to deliver artworks, materials to hang and display the works and more.
That’s where the work of the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC) comes in. The four-year-old international membership organization is working to reduce the arts sector’s carbon emissions by a minimum of 50 percent – by 2030. The group now boasts 1,500 members worldwide and recently announced an initiative with 13 art fair organizations, including Untitled Art, Frieze, TEFAF and Art Basel, focused on reducing waste and emissions tied to air transport of artworks.
Heath Lowndes, managing director of GCC and a co-founder, says that the impetus for founding the organization came down to the fact that previously “no tailored environmental best practices existed for commercial galleries. Recognising this critical gap, the founding group was determined to develop resources that the sector urgently needed.” And the carbon footprint of the art world isn’t insignificant: A 2021 report estimated that emissions from the art sector on a global basis clock in at a minimum of 70 million tCO2e per year, which equals that produced by the entire country of Morocco.
He cites three important ways that galleries and museums can take collective action to reduce carbon outputs, thereby lessening their impact on global heating.
1. Start a Green Team: Lowndes first recommends naming a dedicated group of staff to have responsibility. “Taking individual action on climate issues can be hard, but a Green Team offers an empowering way to make a difference,” says Lowndes. “Having a dedicated internal group working towards targets will make the process more efficient. A Green Team is a group of employees engaged in advancing sustainability within an organization.” For a smaller organization, he recommends appointing one person as a Green Ambassador. “Successes might not always happen straight away, but by carving out a specialist team, organizations will be building a culture of climate impact awareness,” adds Lowndes.
2. Complete a Carbon Report: The GCC offers a special tool for galleries and museums – the Carbon Calculator – purpose built as a way to measure and reduce an organization’s environmental impact and create an annual carbon report. “An annual report takes a holistic view of their operations over a year, meaning they can capture the entirety of their emissions, and nothing falls between the gaps. Organizations can use GCC’s newly redesigned Carbon Calculator to measure emissions data for a retrospective 12 month period to establish their carbon footprint baseline, from which a reduction target for 2030 can be set. By making carbon reporting an annual task, similar to tax returns or financial record-keeping, they can effectively track their progress towards emission reduction targets.” While collecting this data may sound daunting, notes Lowndes, “much of it should already be available through finance records, departments and/or registrars.” (As part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the Getty is working with GCC to continue to optimize its Carbon Calculator.)
3. Publish an Environmental Responsibility Statement: GCC advises galleries and museums to take a loud and proud stance about their green initiatives. “This is a way to take public responsibility for their environmental impact as an organization,” says Lowndes, detailing that “the statement should acknowledge the seriousness of the environmental crisis, clearly state their position on this issue and summarize the actions they are taking to address it. This will show their staff, audiences and other stakeholders that they are serious, help motivate their organization internally to follow their action pledges and encourage stakeholders and supporters to hold them accountable.” He also says that GCC members shouldn’t feel the need to be perfect as “none of us are at this point. We’re all doing our best to assess, report and reduce our impact, setting targets in line with science, taking any actions we can and working out other solutions as we go.”
Completing these three steps will quality galleries for the GCC’s Active Member badge. Among the many ways that arts institutions can reduce their emissions is to ship artworks by ocean freight rather than air freight. Cutting back on nonessential travel will also be a boon. The GCC has even published a toolkit for artists providing a host of best practices for being more environmentally conscious in the studio setting. (Among the galleries that have supported the work of the GCC with donations are Hauser & Wirth, Lisson Gallery, PACE, White Cube, Kornfeld Galerie Berlin and Victoria Miro.)
Hopefully 2024 represents a watershed moment for the art world when it comes to making a difference for the environment. In addition to the work that the GCC is doing, Getty rolled out a Climate Impact Program for its participating institutions and more than 40 have completed impact reports on their exhibitions. And there are other ways to engage in addition to reducing energy and material use. As part of its newest show, the Vincent Price Art Museum is not only participating in the Getty’s Climate Impact Program, but it has also given unrestricted donations to Indigenous and environmental justice organizations. And L.A.’s Broad museum is planting 100 native trees in Los Angeles’ Elysian Park in conjunction with its new PST Art exhibit Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature.
“In the midst of an environmental emergency, urgent and collective action has never been more critical. With inadequate governmental interventions, it falls on sectors like ours to lead by example and drive meaningful change,” says Lowndes, adding that “The visual arts sector holds a unique power to engage vast audiences, fostering climate empathy and shaping public attitudes on an emotional level. Research shows that when trusted institutions – like galleries and museums – take visible, positive steps, it inspires others to act. Our work is about harnessing this influence, creating momentum and building a community driven to make a meaningful impact together.”
Degen Pener is a West Hollywood-based writer and editor with a focus on the environment, culture and design. He is the executive editor of the Four Seasons magazine and is the former deputy editor of The Hollywood Reporter. He has previously written for The New York Times, Out, Los Angeles Magazine, Santa Barbara Magazine, Wallpaper, Veranda and New York Magazine and is a board member of the sustainability nonprofit Habits of Waste.