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Indicators: Artists on Climate Change uses Storm King’s Museum Building and 500-acre site as platforms for seventeen contemporary artists to present work that engages with some of the many challenges—scientific, cultural, personal, psychological—that climate change has brought to humankind. Several artists draw inspiration from Storm King’s landscape and local ecosystem to speak to broader issues impacting the environment, global climate trends, and human ways of life. Environmental stewardship is at the core of Storm King’s mission, and Storm King’s setting—with intimate galleries as well as a host of different landscape conditions—provides artists with a unique and inspiring vantage from which to address ideas surrounding climate change, and also situates our audiences in a frame of mind that might allow them to think afresh about these issues. Ten of the exhibition’s outdoor, site-specific installations are newly created for the exhibition at Storm King.

The artists included here address a range of ideas, parsing the enormously complex topic of a climate in flux. Artists such as Hara Woltz and Mark Dion question and visualize the way the natural world is measured and observed scientifically; others, including Allison Janae Hamilton and Gabriela Salazar, highlight the social and cultural impact of climate-related disasters. Maya Lin, Meg Webster, and Mary Mattingly look forward, envisioning alternative agricultural and planting practices for an increasingly unknown climate future. Tavares Strachan, Justin Brice Guariglia, and the collective Dear Climate have created text-based works that spell out a warning for destructive behaviors that contribute to a changing climate. Alan Michelson and Jenny Kendler focus on locally endangered species, while Mike Nelson, Rebecca Smith, and Steve Rowell examine specific instances of the destruction of our landscape. David Brooks and Ellie Ga take the scientific expedition as their subject. Through a wide variety of conceptual approaches and artistic media, the exhibition demonstrates how art can command attention for difficult subjects and spur creative thought, solutions, and ideas in ways that elude other means of communication and understanding.