A Cultural Institution Taking Action on Climate and Inequality: The Climate Museum in New York City
This paper examines what museums can do to address both the climate crisis and existing structures of inequality in their programs by highlighting the curatorial and educational practices of the Climate Museum in New York City. Founded in 2015 by Director Miranda Massie, the Climate Museum’s mission is to “inspire action on the climate crisis with programming across the arts and sciences that deepens understanding, builds connections, and advances just solutions.” (Massie/Reyes 2020)
(*9) Massie has said that “Our programming aims to give people of all ages an accessible entrypoint into the climate conversation … At our core, we’re working to build a wider culture of climate-forward thinking and active engagement.” (Massie 2020) (*10)
With these explicit goals, the Climate Museum incorporates both a call to action and specific steps to guide attendees and participants toward action into all of its programs, which have included exhibitions, panel discussions, public arts campaigns, youth and adult workshops, and more. The highlighted actions all have a civic orientation, designed to inspire audiences to think of action as it relates to how they are emplaced within their communities and their larger political environments. You can find more details about the Climate Museum’s action asks, current programs, and pivotal 2019 exhibition, Taking Action, in the interview with Climate Museum Senior Exhibitions Associate Anais Reyes and myself in this special issue. (For more on the Climate Museum and its peer institutions creating the grounds for taking action on climate, please see: Newell (2020).) (*11)
I work at the Climate Museum in New York City, where I am the Museum’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality, one of two positions focused on climate and inequality that are funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I will elaborate the Climate Museum’s public discussion series, Talking Climate,*2 *(2) as exemplifying a commitment to elucidating themes at the intersection of climate and inequality. The series provides a model for how museums and other cultural institutions can create programs that educate the public on climate in nuanced and multifaceted ways. This includes showcasing how climate exacerbates and transforms historical and contemporary inequalities and dispossessions, making climate something that is not only the domain of a singular science, but something we must trace and understand through society, culture, politics, economics, and history. By bringing together interdisciplinary experts in conversation, the Talking Climate series offers a blueprint for analyzing multiple crises together at the same time. This suggests a pathway forward for climate policy: that without centering inequality, robust policy will be, at best, incomplete. And this also suggests an avenue for public advocacy: that the twinned crises of climate and inequality are not separable issues, and that real solutions will necessitate a comprehensive approach to their entanglement.
In the following sections, I will briefly explore scholars’ and practitioners’ recent calls for incorporating climate into cultural institution programming, give an example of how museum programming can respond to the urgent concerns of this historical moment, and elaborate on the Climate Museum’s Talking Climate series as an example of successfully curating compelling and urgently needed conversations on climate and inequality while also providing audiences with pathways toward climate action.
The Climate Crisis in Museum Studies and Practice
Over the past few years, there has been a deepening conversation within Museum Studies on how museums, science centers, galleries, and other cultural institutions can account for the realities of climate change in their programming. Indeed, International Council of Museums (ICOM) President Alberto Garlandini said earlier this year that “Many studies confirm that museums are amongst the most trusted institutions across the globe. Museums are in a unique position to support sustainable environmental policies, to disseminate scientific information, and encourage sustainable practices in their local communities.” (Garlandini 2021) (*12)
Museums are also able to reflect and respond to shifting public conventions. Even the term “climate change” may be outliving its utility as an adequate descriptor. Increasingly, institutions are turning to “climate crisis” or even “climate chaos” to emphasize the severe reality of our current planetary condition. With the terrain of public discourse on climate constantly shifting, and new norms and new advances established with regular frequency, what are the best practices for a museum or cultural institution to reflect upon and engage these shifts?
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Dilshanie Perera ( 2021): A Cultural Institution Taking Action on Climate and Inequality: The Climate Museum in New York City. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 12 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/a-cultural-institution-taking-action-on-climate-and-inequality-the-climate-museum-in-new-york-city/
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