Review: “If the Sky Were Orange”

The title of the Blanton Museum of Art's ongoing exhibition "If the Sky Were Orange: Art in the Time of Climate Change" comes from an experience Jeff Goodell had 15 years ago. An award-winning climate journalist and author, Goodell was sailing the North Atlantic on a reporting trip and asked a scientist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute what it would take to convince people to pay attention to the risks of climate change. "If carbon dioxide stained the air purple, people would care," the scientist replied. When Goodell saw Aaron Morse's Cloud World (#3) – an expansive painting crowded with orange clouds above a stormy sea – he saw a version of the same thought. "This is a show about making climate change visible – if not by painting the sky orange, then by seeing its impact through the eyes of artists," he writes in the introductory notes.

The exhibit was curated collaboratively by Goodell, Blanton Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs Carter Foster, and museum Director Simone Wicha. It's the museum's first exhibition to explore one topic across several gallery spaces, and it's a topic that truly requires that space. "Climate change is about many other things besides getting hotter," writes Foster. "It's about migration. It's about greed. It's about corporate power. It's about nature, it's about abundance – all these things."

With all that in mind, the trio went through 120 works in the museum's permanent collection, some dating back to the 1600s, and paired contemporary pieces with written responses by prominent climate writers. "I really relish the opportunity to think about this in different ways," Goodell writes, noting that visual media "reveals nuances about this story that I know so well." Many of the works were not created as a literal commentary on climate change, but they "demonstrate that when we talk about climate change, we are really talking about much deeper things, including our relationship with nature, the promise of technology, and how we define progress."

Goodell's sensibility shines through in the curation. The exhibit is organized almost in chapters, from "the romance of energy" to "the age of abundance" to "consequences" and finally to "the bounty of nature." The accompanying texts in turn contextualize the works within history, politics, and science. John Gerrard's Western Flag, a digital simulation of a black smoke flag perpetually waving atop a desolate landscape, re-creates the exact weather conditions at the current time of Spindletop, the location of Texas' first oil boom. Amy Westervelt, host of the Drilled podcast, observes that "Gerrard's piece shows not only the way that Spindletop and the industry it represents endures, but also that oil wells are ephemeral; they have not always been here, and they need not continue infinitely, despite the oil industry's insistence on the contrary."

Goodell often recounts a story in which Al Gore told him that everyone has an "oh, shit" moment about climate change – they suddenly realize it's a bigger problem than they thought. After this record-shattering summer, Austinites might just have that moment walking through this exhibit. But the show is not meant to be simply a wake-up call; it's also a call to action and projects a lot of hope. In response to Cannupa Hanska Luger's video Future Ancestral Technologies: New Myth, activist Julian Brave NoiseCat writes, "To fight climate change, we don't need more technologies than the ones already at our disposal: batteries, solar panels, culture, imagination. The monsters we must slay have been incorporated, conglomerated, and elected … If we are to survive and restore a more just relationship between humans and the more-than-human world, you will have to slay monsters again."

---

"If the Sky Were Orange: Art in the Time of Climate Change"

The Blanton Museum of Art, 200 E. MLK, 512/471-5482
blantonmuseum.org
Through Feb. 11, 2024