Boulder Magazine Fall 2007 :: feature articles :: business profile

Colorado's EcoArts Festival

A Synergy of Science and Art Addresses Climate Change

By Felicia Russell

Detail from “The Structure of Evolution,” Rebecca DiDomenico’s depiction of global warming included in the “Weather Report” exhibit. Photo courtesy EcoArts

It’s in newspapers, boardrooms and classrooms, but for many people, climate change seems too distant or too huge to do anything about. So a Boulder-grown festival aims to give people hope and a new vision of the future.

EcoArts debuted last year with 11 days of exhibits, lectures, panels and performances in Boulder and Denver that attracted more than 23,000 people. This year’s events span 23 days and include a major art exhibit curated by renowned feminist art critic Lucy Lippard. The show, “Weather Report: Art and Climate Change,” is co-presented by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and EcoArts, and includes art displays at the museum, Norlin Library and NCAR, in front of the Boulder Public Library, and in other, more surprising places around town. The exhibit opens Sept. 14 and runs until Dec. 21.

“I talk about the four Ds, and we’ve got three of them with climate change,” says EcoArts Director Marda Kirn: “denial—it’s not happening; despair—there’s nothing we can do about it; delinquency—it’s happening, there’s nothing we can do about it, let’s go get a Humvee. What I want to do is interject the fourth D, which is delight, which is looking at this crisis as an opportunity to rethink the way that we live and to do things in an innovative way.”

Interaction Is Key

“Weather Report” is a 50-artist exhibit designed to inspire delight and conversation. Curator Lippard spent two years recruiting artists from Colorado to California and as far away as Slovenia. Most of the artists had previously worked with environmental themes, but few of them had dealt specifically with climate change. “The thing that makes this show different from most is that 20 of the artists worked directly with scientists,” Lippard says. For many artist/scientist teams, the science became a jumping-off point for the art.

Ensemble Galilei and NPR’s Neil Conan (at mic) join forces for “Stories from the Edge.” Photo courtesy CU Concerts

Andrew Martin, an associate professor of evolutionary and conservation biology at the University of Colorado, worked with Boulder artist Rebecca DiDomenico. Although they come from seemingly disparate worlds, Martin and DiDomenico found that they both were interested in how the world changes, and were able to talk about how humans might adapt to climate change. “If you put art and science together it’s a good mix,” Martin says. “The science gives some veracity to the imagery you might project. And the artist is a very creative soul who can present something that’s visually pleasing to engage the observer in a way that really makes them have to interact.”

Interaction, it turns out, is a key component of action. EcoArts is based on a study published in the academic journal Environment and Behavior, which asked why people don’t work to improve environmental problems, even when they know a lot about them. The researchers found that people don’t act unless they connect with the problem emotionally. “I thought with EcoArts we could bring together the cognitive power of impeccable science with the affective power of great art, and then at the same time provide very simple action steps that are nonpartisan or bipartisan,” says Kirn.

Bridging the Gap

This concept of bringing together art, science and action is generating excitement beyond Boulder’s borders. BMoCA originally applied for a $30,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to fund “Weather Report,” but the foundation got so excited about the project that it asked the museum to increase the request to $50,000. “This is a major, major show for us,” says Joan Markowitz, co-executive director and senior curator of BMoCA. The $100,000 price tag on “Weather Report” dwarfs the costs of previous BMoCA exhibitions.

The show’s intended audience includes everyone from art lovers and science nuts to children, who can be entertained and educated by a 7-foot-tall polar bear. “We really want to impact the audience. This is really art for social change,” Markowitz says.

Seaside on Dauphin Island, Ala., in November 2005. Photo courtesy Center for Land Use Interpretation

In some ways, Boulder may be the perfect city to host EcoArts, Kirn says. It has a supportive city council, it signed the Kyoto Protocol, it was the first city in North America to institute a carbon tax (charges have appeared on Xcel Energy bills since April 2007), and its residents tend to enjoy the natural world. With so many environmentally minded people in the area, holding an event like EcoArts in Boulder might seem like preaching to the choir. But there’s another side to the story.

“Boulder has a veneer of what it is and then a reality of what it is,” Kirn says. “There’s a big difference between being interested in environmental issues and climate change and leading your life on those principles—and that’s the disconnect. Just look at the big cars people drive and the buses that are nearly empty except for the main routes. Some people adhere to those principles very well, and lots and lots and lots of people don’t.”

For a complete schedule of EcoArts events, go to www.ecoartsonline.org.

Assistant Editor Felicia Russell has covered several environmental topics for Boulder Magazine. She spent a summer studying global warming at Toolik Field Station in Alaska.