Cool Globes

With the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay as a backdrop, 35 seven-foot-tall globes decorated with varying degrees of whimsy remind passers-by that global warming is not so cool.

Bernard Williams, "The World Globe"

Peter Mars, "Mr. Polar Bear Goes to Washington"

The San Francisco exhibit (which also includes a number of globes in other parts of the city and runs through October 12) is part of Cool Globes:Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet. The exhibit originated in Chicago in 2007; currently it is having a reprise at the Field Museum, which is also the final stop of Natural World Museum’s Melting Ice/Hot Topic exhibition. Washington, D.C. is also hosting a cluster of globes, and they will appear in San Diego in late 2008 and in London in early 2009. Each city’s exhibit features local, national, and international artists, some professional and others newly minted to respond to the subject. Children and community groups have been major participants.

Emily Abrams and Michelle Korta Leccia, "Kids Care"

Faheem Majed and Gary Corner Youth Center, "The Corner Connection (Plastics, Metals, and Cell Phones OH MY!

Silly Globe, Serious Message

Artistic reminders that our globe is stressed out have been springing up around San Francisco recently. I’ll write about the Cool Globes in a separate post, but I did want to briefly acknowledge William Wiley’s wonderful Only One Earth “punball” machine, a great combination of the silly and the serious.

Wiley’s machine, based on the classic 1964 Gottlieb North Star pinball machine, is fully playable and lots of fun even for a complete pinball klutz like me. It’s also marked by Wiley’s characteristic kooky style and kitschy characters, and environmental puns (“The Eye-Scabs are melting”)–all in all a great way to keep you chuckling while getting across a serious message. Wiley created five multiples of the machine with the Electric Works Gallery, where it was originally shown along with accompanying Only One Earth watercolors. That show has closed, but the punball machine will be part of the Wiley retrospective opening at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in October 2009. (For those who’d like to see Wiley’s contraption in the company of fellow game machines, it will be at the Pacific Pinball Exposition in October.)

Environmental Art: Going Beyond the Trend

“I hesitated about doing this show because I don’t want to be trendy, and I don’t like the fact that green is trendy now.”  So said Mina Dresden when I spoke to her at her gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District a few days ago.  Despite her misgivings, or perhaps because of them, the Mina Dresden Gallery is currently presenting (through August 22) a wonderful show called The EnvironMENTAL Paradigm.  Curated by independent curator and writer Cecilia Nuin, the show includes pieces in various media by eight artists of various nationalities.

Maria Adela Diaz, Blossom, Video performance. Courtesy of MIna Dresden Gallery.

Jessica Resmond, Grass Billboard, Digital print. Courtesy of Mina Dresden Gallery.

Ana Labastida, Kun Li: Light sinks into the earth and is veiled, nonetheless it shines forth. I Ching 36. Photography, light box. Courtesy of Mina Dresden Gallery.

But as interesting as the works themselves is a question at the heart of this exhibit: What is environmental art?

What are they doing now?

Natural World Museum’s current exhibition, Moving Towards a Balanced Earth: Kick the (Carbon) Habit, features 31 international artists. Many other artists have participated in NWM’s earlier exhibitions, and I thought it would be interesting to see what a few of them—Subhankar Banerjee, Andrea Polli, and Lucy + Jorge Orta—have been up to lately. Since the NWM artist list is quite extensive, this sampling is not intended to be representative;  I’ll try to follow other NWM artists from time to time in future posts.