Fragile Earth: Artists Respond to Climate Change

The earth is the source of all life and one of our most revered inspirations. It is also under grave threat. The following works represent an artistic call to action from a group of creators who remind us of the reverence and awe unique to the planet. This collection represents a new online iteration of the Save the Earth exhibition, that was scheduled to hang at Art at First Gallery, but was canceled due to the Pandemic. The New York Artists Circle is proud to be able to offer a virtual platform for this important work, curated by Fran Beallor and Barbara Sherman.

Curator’s Note
The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change, features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades. Published in October 2020, it includes Pulitzer Prize-winning works by Elizabeth Kolbert, the "eloquent voice of conscience," and Bill McKibben’s heroically prescient essay “The End of Nature,” the first truly extensive exploration of the climate crisis for a non-science audience. With climate change denying politicians and their constituencies still ignoring the cries of the planet, these writers sound the alarm: if nothing is done, there will be nothing left.  

Inspired to action, Barbara Sherman, director of Art at First Gallery in New York City conceived an exhibition, Save the Earth, as the New York Artists Circle's Response to the Climate Crisis. Sherman teamed up with NYAC Co-Leader, Fran Beallor, to curate this important show but it was canceled due to the Pandemic.    

Revised, reformatted, and renamed for this online presentation, Beallor and Sherman are thrilled to present Fragile Earth: Artists respond to Climate Change. NYAC artists responded from a myriad of vantage points. Some seek to educate, some call us to action, while others memorialize endangered species or wilderness settings. All see the crisis against the backdrop of their individual aesthetics and believe that voices and art have a significant impact.  

As the work was reviewed, themes emerged: forests in bloom and on fire; glaciers with secret writings and melting majesty; aerial views of threatened vistas; close ups of endangered animals, birds and botanicals; moments of nature in the urban environment; things we take for granted. Some artists examine the beauty and threat of our industrial landscape, sometimes using text and graphs to highlight the issues in a more overtly political manner. Others create their work from recycled materials so that the very creation of the work becomes a statement about our environment. There is a strong thread of abstraction, a poetic approach to the intense internal feelings that this crisis evokes.   

Patterns in the art reflect patterns in nature, mathematical and rhythmical, symmetrical and fractal, incorporating tessellations, stripes and spirals, meanders, waves and foams. A certain unity of the varied colors of nature arose in the curation: a preponderance of earthly colors, intense turquoise and glacial blues, and the verdant greens of flora, combined with a host of fiery tones that reflect the heat of a warming planet. Using paint, sculpture, mixed media, print making, collage, and photography, the combined voices of these 48 artists creates an iridescent richness of sentiments of both hope and horror, beauty blended with the sadness of loss, and a bloom of optimism.  
-Fran Beallor