Sarah Lawrence College’s Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce exhibition opening of Groundings: Care and Climate Justice with artists Emily Johnson (of the Yup’ik Nation), Cannupa Hanska Luger (of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, and the Lakota Nation), Courtney Desiree Morris, and Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika).
On view: March 26 - May 12, 2024
Artist Roundtable Event: March 26 at 6 pm Donnelly Film Theatre, Heimbold Visual Arts Center
This group show is the final exhibition in the Care and Climate Justice series. To care – as labor, as ethic, as the quite unglamorous, everyday reproduction of life – is critically undervalued and unrecognized. Care often only becomes visible, to its beneficiaries at least, in moments of crisis when care is found to be lacking, or stretched. Put this way, climate crisis can be read in terms of a planetary care crisis, exposing a systematic devaluation of care in the past century and the generation of unfathomable care needs in this one.
Groundings insists on care as a slow, attentive, relational foundation for climate action, climate adaptation, and energy transition. Against the urgency and presentism that tends to dominate climate discourse, Groundings is rooted in the radical care traditions of those who have long endured environmental crisis on this continent, now centuries deep into settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Climate action divorced from an understanding of, and resistance to, ongoing injustice is nothing but business as usual, albeit washed “green” or “zero-carbon.”
The artists in the exhibition invoke care as a form of grief and remembrance, slowness, attention and refusal, expansive imagination and speculative worldmaking. In works that are communal and collaborative, they model forms of interconnectedness, pleasure, and kinship. In response to violent pasts and presents, they imagine and prefigure diverse visions of Indigenous, Black, and Brown futurity. Across media and from a particular place and experience, these artists explore possibility and becoming, which loosens the grip that despair and anxiety have on us as dominant moods of the Anthropocene. Care is more than collective survival, more than resistance; it is the necessary relational infrastructure for collective flourishing.
This exhibition is co-curated by Sarah Hamill and Izzy Lockhart, with Janine Ryan and Nina Serrano ‘25, funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, which supports the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE), a collaboration to teach climate justice across the humanities at Sarah Lawrence and Bronx Community College.
A catalog will accompany the four Care and Climate Justice exhibitions, with artist interviews by students, an introduction by Art History faculty Sarah Hamill and Literature faculty Izzy Lockhart, and essays by poet and scholar Sumita Chakraborty, educator and community-based researcher alum K. Melchor Hall ‘00, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Public Humanities and History faculty Karintha Lowe, settler scholar and artist Emily Roehl, scholar, curator and writer Camille Georgeson-Usher, and Writing faculty and Strachan Donnelley Visiting Professor in Environmental Writing Kate Zambreno.
Join us on March 26 for the opening of "Groundings," the final of four exhibitions on the theme of Care and Climate Justice, and a roundtable discussion with artists Shanequa Benitez, Emily Johnson, Courtney Desiree Morris, Sarah Rosalena, Laia Cabrera, and Isabelle Duverger.