Installation view. Photo courtesy of Martina Tanga
Curator Martina Tanga had been reflecting on the ideas behind Learning With Trees – Artists for Climate and Environmental Solutions long before the exhibition took shape. In 2022, she read Ben Rawlence’s The Treeline, a book tracing how the Boreal forest is shifting under the impact of climate change. That reading sparked the idea that trees could serve as a highly accessible and disarmingly effective way to approach conversations about climate change.
Installation view of Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons in The Frick Collection’s Cabinet Gallery, showing Autumn and Winter. Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.
What draws artists and audiences back to the Baroque now, in a century shaped by speed and fracture? Perhaps it is the recognition of kinship. The seventeenth century was also an age of cataclysm and wonder — continents mapped, the cosmos recalculated, science expanding perception. The Baroque arose amid fracture: religious schisms, shifting empires, faith and politics entangled. Art became theatrical, constructed to move the spirit through light, motion, and sensation.
Samuelle Green. By Day: By Night. 2025. (variable size) Installation View — Honesdale, PA. steel, reflective material. photo credit: Samuelle Green Studio
In Samuelle Green’s previous installations such as The Paper Caves and Polypore, viewers encountered forms that were wildly organic in appearance. They were comprised of somewhat amorphous essentialized forms in nature that exist on the micro and macro levels, executed on an immersive human scale, enabling viewers to make a variety of associations with the natural world — pollen grains, clouds, or coral reefs. The new work, By Day: By Night, 2025, is much more specific in its references and seeks to speak a different visual language almost entirely.
Sari Carel, A More Perfect Circle, 2024. Courtesy KODA, photo by Argenis Apolinario.
Artist and activist Sari Carel created A More Perfect Circle, a series of ceramic sculptures inspired by the single-use coffee cup, a ubiquitous object that brings into focus people’s daily experience of interacting with trash. Lentol Garden in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, hosts its first public art project that includes columns built of stacked ceramic forms and disks in the shape of plastic cup covers. The handmade, intentional, and individualized quality of each unit contrasts with the mass-manufactured coffee cup that inspires this project. Some of the drawings, experiments and observations that inform the installation are on view at the Greenpoint Library. A series of programs with 350Brooklyn and Climate Families NYC accompany the exhibition. Find out more here. The project is organized by KODA, a New York-based nonprofit arts organization dedicated to mid-career artists of diverse backgrounds. It is curated by Jennifer McGregor, who interviews Sari Carel for the Hot Air section in Art Spiel.
‘Desire Lines’ by Stefania Urist. Image by Alexa Hoyer. Courtesy of Socrates Sculpture Park.
Founded in 1986 by artists, activists, and community members, Socrates Sculpture Park transformed an abandoned landfill into a cultural cornerstone in Queens, New York. This dual-purpose venue serves both as a public park and an exhibition space for contemporary art, targeting early- and mid-career artists. Occupying five waterfront acres, Socrates provides a unique platform for artistic expression and public engagement, offering free access to a civic space amidst the urban environment.
It consists of nature walks and community interventions in the gallery and various locations throughout the Bay Ridge community from April 15 through June 17, 2023. Art Spiel features a series of interviews related to this project throughout its duration. Kate Dodd, whose library installation will be until after Labor Day, is featured here.
David Brooks, installation shots of Budding Bird Blind, at Planting Fields Arboretum, Oyster Bay, NY, and maquettes showing the future forest succession as the trees supplant the building
On April 23rd, Earth Day, 2023, at the Catskill Art Space in Livingston Manor, NY, I moderated a panel on artists’ responses to the climate crisis titled “Envisioning Adaptation.” The panel was one of the many events the director of the CAS, Sally Wright, has hosted at the arts and performance space newly refurbished in 2022. The concept for the symposium was to create a forum of artists whose practices addressed the idea of adaptation to, as opposed to mitigation of, the climate crisis. The panel participants included David Brooks, Simone Couto, Alexandra Hammond, Brian Kelley, and J. Morgan Puett.
Jac Lahav, Immersive blue vine installation on the hardship and beauty of being a foster parent
Jac Lahav: The Saffron Thief at Sugarlift is an immersive installation about the artist’s experience as a foster parent. At the center, a large sculpture titled 29, references 29 points of contact that the artist has had with different foster children. The lines of saffron and gold leaf across abstracted canvases, and a site-specific wall drawing allure visitors to enter Lahav’s world.
Michael A. Robinson’s site-specific project Somma, at DISPLAY in Parma, Italy, is the sum of many parts, all operating in tandem. The installation appears simple, featuring three wall-mounted LED works and metal arcs and hoops suspended from the ceiling. The space’s glossy floor and glass façade and door reflect the light emitted by the LEDs, potentially multiplying their presence based on the viewer’s position and the level of ambient light.
Deanna Sirlin, Borders of Light and Water, 2022, C-print transparency on glass, 199.5 x 493 inches, Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy
In Borders of Light and Water at Palazzo Bembo in Venice, American artist Deanna Sirlin utilizes the architecture and translucency of the large-scale windows overlooking the Grand Canal, to create a luminous and ever-changing patches of bold color. The beauty of this installation allures you in and prompts you to gaze out at the flickering water of the iconic canal below, raising awareness to what is at stake with rising water and changing climate. This installation is part of the Venice 2022 Art Biennial organized by the non-profit organization European Cultural Center, running from April 23, 2022 through November 27th, 2022.
