Staring Down the Barrel Of Climate Change

Art doesn’t have to be topical to be good. But, like Picasso’s Guernica, much of what’s considered “important” art does grapple with contemporary events. Even as the globe battles the Covid-19 pandemic, cataclysmic climate change remains a key threat. These four artists are facing it head-on, not only with lofty sentiment but also with actions large and small

BLANE DE ST. CROIX

From: Boston

Works in: New York

Focus: Ice melt

Blane de St. Croix uses scale models to demystify geopolitical issues: In 2009 he re-created several miles of the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Texas in a 100-foot miniature, “so the public could actually walk it,” he says. Another project mapped the line between Afghanistan and Pakistan in mountainous Tora Bora. Climate change, he says, is “the next border issue.”

Completed in 2009, one of his first works to deal directly with climate change displayed a West Virginia mountain range with its top removed for strip mining as a 40-foot-long, 22-foot-high model. “I scale up my work so people can’t avoid it,” he says. Soon he was receiving grants and going on scientific expeditions to remote corners of the globe. “I had the opportunity to go to Svalbard [Norway] and travel with scientists to be a witness to glaciers that will never be around again,” he says. “I went to the high Arctic in Alaska, where you can stand on the coast and physically watch the permafrost melt away.”

The trips were illuminating and “increased my responsibility,” de St. Croix says. Many experts he met were desperate for people to tell their stories. His art, he realized, could bring broad audiences into the conversation.