How Curators Are Keeping the Climate Conversation Alive

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How Curators Are Keeping the Climate Conversation Alive

WikiCommons

Caspar David Friedrich, Northern Landscape, Spring, c. 1825. License

At a time when climate change solutions feel farther from the national agenda than they have in years, cultural institutions across the United States are staging exhibitions that seem like well-timed efforts to keep the environmental conversation alive. Four major museums in New York City have exhibitions with nature or landscape as their primary theme in 2025. Half a dozen additional museums spread around the country have done the same this year.

Coincidence? Maybe. But, the overall effect is striking. Organizing and researching an exhibition can take anywhere from months to years. In large museums, it is almost always the latter. This means that the current flurry of climate-related exhibitions was ideated well before environmental protection slipped off America’s political priority list. Regardless, everything from website descriptions to exhibition titles make it clear that curators are not shying away from important climate conversations, bringing museum visitors along with them.

WikiCommons

Swedish artist Hilma af Klint at her studio in Stockholm. License

The Whitney Museum of American Art wrapped up Shifting Landscapes this winter. The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature this spring. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presented Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers this summer. And, the Brooklyn Museum of Art will open Oliver Jeffers: Life at Sea this fall. Between the four, New York City museum-goers will have access to almost 12 full months of nature-focused art this year.

Although some lean more heavily into the climate conversation than others, all give at least a nod to the importance of the natural world in exhibition materials. Shifting Landscapes lies on one end of the spectrum with blatant connections between the exhibition’s content and its socio-environmental context. Hilma af Klint lies at the other end, subtly gesturing towards “the interconnectedness of all living things,” as MoMa’s website explains.

Elsewhere along the East Coast, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the National Gallery of Art (NGA) hosted similarly themed exhibitions. Yu-Wen Wu: Reigning Beauty, 2025 is a site-specific installation that, according to the Gardner, is “at once an homage to the fleeting beauty of the natural world and meditation on the precious vulnerability of the environment.” NGA’s exhibition of Chakaia Booker’s discarded tire sculptures forces visitors to confront an industrial landscape of their own making.

WikiCommons

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. License

On the West Coast, both The Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) have held nature-centric exhibitions this year. LACMA’s forthcoming Grounded and ongoing Nature on Notice: Contemporary Art and Ecology collectively engage the work of more than 30 artists to examine overlaps between culture and environment.

Major museums in the South and Midwest have a much lower representation of environmental-focused exhibitions this year. Even so, there is no shortage of access to art in the United States that speaks directly or adjacently to the ongoing climate crisis. Whether museum visitors continue the conversation outside gallery walls is up to them.

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