Art and Climate Change

Fall 2024, Swarthmore College

This course surveys art’s relationship to climate change from the 18th century to today. It introduces significant artists and movements who address and/or reflect climate change, in addition to many important topics initiated by writers and thinkers in scientific, philosophical, and political fields. This course underscores art’s role as a contributor to climate change as well as its traditional role to communicate or represent climate change. This course aimed to focus on the environmental history of the greater Philadelphia region through historical case studies and several off-campus visits to local museums, organizations, and artist studios in order to make the course topics tangible to our material and local context. We visited Philadelphia’s RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency), Diane Burko’s studio, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art where Aislinn E. Pentecost-Farren led us on her ecocritical tour of the museum, “Crisis in the Collection: The Art History of Climate Change.”