Dollars and Sense is thrilled to announce the publication of our newest package. “Climate Change in New York City” is the culmination of months of research, reporting, writing and editing from the skilled team of students and faculty at Baruch College.
Over the course of the Spring 2023 semester, D&S explored the multifaceted dimensions of climate change in New York City. Our team visited climate museums, spoke to local experts and addressed current issues facing New Yorkers.
We covered everything from the creation of over 1000 jobs in South Brooklyn’s wind energy industry to fiber activists in Upstate New York documenting changing temperatures through knitting. Through engaging narratives and compelling photos, this package aims to educate and empower readers on sustainability issues close to home.
Thanks to the dedication and guidance of Baruch journalism professors Gisele Regatao, Emily Johnson and Andrea Gabor, and the student editors Yadira Gonzalez and Mira Ciganek, D&S is proud to present “Climate Change in New York City.”
Dollars and Sense students and faculty are gathered outside the Climate Museum pop-up in New York City. Photo courtesy of Mira Ciganek.
Knitted by Emily McNiel, the “Paleo New Normal” depicts global temperature data over the last 2000 years. Photo credited to the Tempestry Project.
By Gabriel Rivera
The Adirondack Watershed Institute, a program at Paul Smith’s College dedicated to promoting clean water, was searching for grants to fund their education and outreach programs in the surrounding community two summers ago.
Naturally, they turned to yarn.
Michale Glennon, an AWI senior research scientist and lifelong knitter, incorporated a fiber arts community program in the institute’s grant application to the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership, an organization that preserves the natural and cultural history of the region surrounding Lake Champlain.
Once their submission was approved, the subsequent grant manifested into “Wool and Water,” a collaborative project that uses fiber arts such as knitting and crocheting to visualize scientific data. It focused on environmental issues that endanger water quality in the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain Basin.
That summer, Glennon, poised as the program’s director, crafted scarfs, shawls and other fiber art pieces to create an exhibit promoting “Wool and Water.” The exhibit garnered such a positive response that AWI received a larger grant to expand its exposure throughout the Lake Champlain Basin.
“I struggle with it a little bit, because the response is really positive and it’s more enthusiastic than like any of the kajillion lectures I’ve given about ecology over my career,” she said.
Several close up pieces from the “Wool and Water” exhibit. Photos courtesy of the Tempestry Project.
At first glance, “Wool and Water”’s success seems like a simple outgrowth of a renewed interest in fiber arts inspired by COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, in which people of all ages stuck at home and desperate to disconnect from their screens turned to knitting for stress relief. With “Wool and Water,” however, Glennon and the AWI tapped into a sometimes tangled, but common thread between climate activism and tight-knit fiber arts communities on online platforms like Facebook, Reddit and Ravelry, a website where fiber artists and hobbyists share their crafts.
Now, Glennon fields queries from fiber art hobbyists as far as Southern California. They created a movement that keeps growing.
“In the knitting, fiber art communities, they all know each other,” Glennon said. “They all share it with someone else they think might like it.”
Glennon is a terrestrial wildlife ecologist who grew up in the Adirondacks. She has worked in the region since 1998 and traced “Wool and Water”’s motivation back to the second half of 2019. This was when famed climate activist Greta Thunberg sailed on a zero-emission racing yacht to New York for a climate summit and bushfires scorched parts of Southeast Australia comparable to the size of Syria.
“I was so overwhelmed by my thoughts about climate change at that time,” Glennon said. “I was like: ‘I need to channel this into something.’”
Glennon crocheted a dress visualizing NASA data on global temperature deviations since 1880, in which each row represented a year and each color gradient signified a temperature range spanning from cold to hot.
The Tempestry Project
Both her dress and Wool and Water were inspired by the Tempestry Project, another collaborative data visualization initiative that unites climate activism and fiber artists nationwide to advocate for increased environmental awareness.
The project’s co-founders, Emily McNeil and Asy Connelly, started crafting “tempestries,” a portmanteau of “temperature” and “tapestry,” in 2017, galvanized by local environmental issues in their small hometown of Anacortes, Washington.
Emily McNeil, co-founder of the Tempestry Project, sits kneels in the snow with one of her recent pieces. Photo credited to the Tempestry Project.
Now based in New York, the project sells “tempestry” kits, comprised of yarn and crafting tools such as knitting needles or crochet hooks. They also provide datasets to customers who then create “tempestries” that represent temperature data for a particular time range and location.
McNeil and Connelly also advise contributors, many of whom they have never met in-person, working on larger, collaborative “tempestries” within their respective local communities, customizing the data and yarn they ship to them.
The pair frequent climate protests and organize educational outreach workshops, hauling their “tempestries” in tow. Among the regular pieces to appear are “original tempestries,” representing daily high temperatures for a specific year and location, and “new normal tempestries,” which, like Glennon’s dress, visualize annual global temperature anomalies from the late 19th century to the present.
A new addition to their demonstration is what they call the “Paleo new normal” “tempestry.” Knitted by McNeil, the piece totals 20 feet long and consists of over 2,000 rows representing global temperature data from 1 C.E. to the present. A cool blue cascades over much of the piece before receding at the far end into a deep, Dantean red, representing a spike in global warming in the last century.
“Their jaws just drop,” Connelly said, referring to visitors’ reactions when they see the Paleo piece. “It’s a lot more impactful for people who might not pay that much attention in their daily lives to climate change.”
McNeil and Connelly attribute the project’s sustained success to its active communities of contributors on Facebook and Ravelry.
“Tempestries,” McNeil said, built off the legacy of temperature blankets, which are also crafted using temperature data and have been a staple creation on these forums for close to a decade.
This greater trend of using fiber art to visualize climate data can be read as a widespread response to an overexposure to numbers, according to Madison Snell, an information designer who wrote her master’s thesis on interdisciplinary design strategy on data physicalization through textile and fiber arts.
Snell, a fiber arts hobbyist since her youth, embarked on her thesis topic in 2019 after seeing more and more crafters post their own personal temperature blankets in Reddit and Facebook groups. Then, she interviewed crafters, including the Tempestry Project, who created fiber artwork inspired by data ranging from temperature records to nightly hours of sleep.
Applying her thesis research, Snell suggested the enduring confluence of environmental activism and fiber arts may be the newest way people are revitalizing conversations surrounding climate change.
The range of temperature fluctuations depicted within the Tempestry Project. Photo courtesy of the Tempestry Project.
“When you hit all of those reds and the reds keep getting darker, it’s just that stark, constant reminder that our world is changing,” Snell said regarding “tempestries.” “That’s 10, 20 minutes a day that you’re sitting with those thoughts, rather than looking at a chart on the computer.”
For Glennon, the humanizing effects fiber crafts have are exactly why she hopes to expand the educational component of the “Wool and Water” project. Much of Glennon’s current outreach consists of organizing workshops at local events and promoting a few pieces at a local farmers market, but she intends to bring “Wool and Water” to classrooms and keep the project for as long as she can.
“It’s really tactile, it’s really colorful, and I think that people participating in it gives them a feeling that they’re sort of like somehow contributing to this broader conversation,” Glennon said. “And maybe it’s a form of activism that feels less daunting than calling your legislator or marching.”
Opdyke’s mural is the only piece of original art within the Climate Museum. It accompanies interactive exhibits, collections of climate focused books and more.
Photos and Review by Caspar Gajewski
End times are many-named, having been called Frashokereti, the end of history, Armageddon, the place of the last battle, and Dabbah, the planet-killing comet. Even if apt, compared with these eschatologies, our nomenclature is boring: climate change.
“Someday, all this,” Queens-based artist David Opdyke’s most recent work, is a better name for these portentous times. It is being shown at the Climate Museum’s current pop-up in SoHo. Comprised of some 400 hand-painted postcards from early twentieth century America, the mosaic measures eight by 11 feet and appears, at first glance, like a Google search image result for “tranquil vacation spots near me.” Think again.
Up-close, close enough to make a security guard shudder, mostly rural postcards resolve into Opdyke’s added scenes of apocalyptic pageantry. Tentacular presences poke out of wheat fields, decimating crops, or ensnare boats, dragging them beneath the water’s surface. Fire wreathes the crests of skyscrapers, and monstrous banalities, grown titanic—giant monarch butterflies, caterpillars and crows—sack cities. Signs flutter, ragged and exhausted, in still winds: “GO BACK,” “This is not our problem,” “Let us in.” The work is a biblical revelation, postlapsarian.
Just a little light sightseeing at the end of the world: “Which Airbnb did you say, honey, burning tower or crumbling cliff?”
Is “Someday, all this” gorgeous? Yes. Does it engender shame? Yeah, that, too. It terrifies as it titillates. For a generation raised on a steady diet of environmental dystopias and now living through one, the piece satisfies all of our apathetic yearnings to just let go. And yet. Take a step back, put distance between yourself and it, and peer at the pastels that rear up like a rainbow after a storm. There is something pastoral there, something to be saved.
Opdyke was born in post-industrial Schenectady, New York, just five years after General Electric relocated its manufacturing facility from there to Fairfield, Connecticut, leaving thousands jobless. His artwork is haunted by evacuations of this kind, empty, mute manifestations of impersonal but life-destroying systems: extractive capitalism, environmental despoliation, consumerism, American militarism.
“Oil Empire,” released in 2003, was an astonishing grid of Gordian pipes in the shape of the United States. In 2006,“Prospect” arrived, a crowning achievement in his diagnostic library of human ills, a bas-relief, a slab of geology, striated and strange. In the middle of his wall to end all walls is a thin line, a nod to the irradiated KT boundary: a stratum of plastic and metal, the materials that, if we perish, are likely all that will remain to identify us.
In 2019, when “This Land,” his first of three postcard murals to date, was given its vernissage, something had changed, utterly. Gone are the finger wagging polemics against bad faith politics. Knackered, Opdyke’s anger had transmuted into love and concentrated figuration, focusing his mind on the people affected by systems rather than the other way round.
“Someday, all this” is moving precisely because it is not haunted. We are alive, however tenuously, in his ravaged worlds. Jostling alongside signs decrying “NO CLIMATE REFUGEES” are clarions to community: seeking respite, a flotilla of sailboats scythes through water, backpacked travelers hump along uprooted roads, undeterred, a phalanx of bare-chested men fish for food, sporting for survival.
The Climate Museum bills itself as an “activist museum.” Closing its doors at the end of April, it is open just long enough to acknowledge Earth Month. At the current pop-up visitors are encouraged to write letters to their congressional representatives, their family or friends, on reprints of Opdyke’s postcards, which the museum mails at no cost. In that milieu, there is something numinous in “Someday, all this.” The postcards become prayers.
Apocalyptic visions are not new. In 1830, Jonathan Martin released “London’s Overthrow,” prefiguring Opdyke’s works. Above the city a lion laments a burning, damned London, messy, pillaged by marauding armies, sentient flames and divine symbology.
Fifty years later, Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead. And we have killed him.” The Judeo-Christian worldview was collapsing under the strain of Darwin’s piercing gaze. Ideologies both hopeful and hateful arose to supplant it.
In the following century, after the two World Wars, after the Green Revolution and “Silent Spring,” an American chemist named James Lovelock looked at Earth and felt cosseted. He leveraged science to propose an essentially animist idea: the Gaia hypothesis, which states that Earth is a self-regulating, complex organism. Read: alive.
“Someday, all this,” still holds its center, precariously. Frayed bungee cords are painted crisscrossing through each postcard. If you step back, there is a bit of the vestigial animism of the Gaia hypothesis at play within the piece. Neither the art nor the Earth is alive, of course, but they linger in us.
A closer look at Opdyke’s piece displays ravaged countrysides and polluted waterways. Photo courtesy of the Climate Museum.
At the center of the mural stands a half-naked toddler, his back turned on us in rebuke. He is on a beach, at the end of the world, peering out at the horizon. The sun might be setting or rising.
Opdyke’s postcards, sent forward by some tachyon technology, might be the warning our progenitors would have mailed to us, had they known what they were summoning. But now, in the light and full of knowledge, we knowingly send these to our grandchildren in greeting. “Lo,” we say, “welcome to your new world.”
New York City DOT hosts the Summer Streets program, closing down Park Avenue to car traffic on weekends. Photo courtesy of Peyzer Firm News.
By Mira Ciganek
New York City has a secret. Hidden by skyscrapers and subway cars, this concrete jungle has become one of the most climate-conscious places to live in the nation.
New York leads the country in walkability and car-free residences. It ranks in the top five U.S. cities with the most Energy Star Certified buildings, the Environmental Protection Agency’s seal of approval. And the state as a whole boasts a low ecological impact based on the demand for natural resources and available space.
In April, Mayor Eric Adams rolled out PlaNYC: Getting Sustainability Done, the fifth in a series of wide ranging campaigns focused on reducing food waste, transitioning to clean energy sources for homes and cars and ensuring that climate policies also benefit the neediest New Yorkers.
Beyond New York City, public policy is a key to reducing the energy emissions of everything from high rise buildings to power plants. That’s because the lion’s share of the world’s carbon emissions can be traced to the activities of 100 companies.
Indeed, despite its best environmental efforts, New York continues to face a Herculean task in minimizing the effects of climate change. Rising sea levels and tidal flooding continue to threaten the city’s increasingly vulnerable coastlines.
New York City sea level measurements taken over the last seventy years. Graph courtesy of Sea Level Rise.
So, what more can New Yorkers do to reduce the threat of climate change? Dollars and Sense compiled recent data and sat down with local climate experts to try to answer that question.
Participate in Local Politics
From voting to signing petitions to calling your representatives, staying active in local politics is especially crucial to combating climate change. As much as the average resident can accomplish, legislation can help to update infrastructure, ensure environmental protections and reach long term solutions. “I can change my light bulbs, but I can’t change the power source that Con-Ed delivers,” Bluestone said.
Volunteer
Volunteering with environmental and political organizations is one of the best ways individuals can participate in climate activism. This can look different for everyone. Whether it’s raising money by running a 5K or carving out time each week to call your local representatives, there are a variety of volunteer opportunities across each borough.
“There are ways for everybody to participate regardless of how much time or energy or money they have,” Mimi Bluestone, the founder of 350 Brooklyn, said. 350 Brooklyn, an offshoot of the national organization 350.org, has been a community staple for nearly a decade. They send members to Washington on a regular basis to lobby against climate change.
New Yorkers gather for the Run for Your Lives 5K. Hosted by 350 Brooklyn, the charity run garners funding and support for climate change in New York City. Photo courtesy of 350 Brooklyn.
Make Educated Donations
For those who don’t have the time to volunteer, making smart donations is another effective way to take action against climate change. Based on your interests and your budget, there are a variety of New York based nonprofits to choose from.
NY Renews collaborates with hundreds of environmental associations ranging from faith-based groups to grassroots campaigns. They advocate for low-income communities affected by climate change and aid in job creation in the clean energy industry. Sunrise NYC is an offshoot of the national Sunrise Movement. It caters to a younger audience fighting for the Green New Deal. NYC Environmental Justice Alliance focuses on underserved neighborhoods and communities of color in their fight against climate change. It has been pursuing environmental justice since 1991.
New York City’s “Skip the Stuff” bill was announced last year in support of reducing plastic waste from disposable restaurant packaging. It is one of several new initiatives like the city’s composting program and the option to transition to solar energy. Yes, it’s possible, even as a renter.
Look for Alternative Modes of Transportation
Climate scientist Dr. Chuixiang Yi is a strong proponent of further reducing car travel in New York City. Walking, biking and public transportation are greener alternatives as they improve fuel efficiency, road congestion and community mobility. “If New York were to just become a bicycle city, that would be wonderful,” said Yi.
Even switching to electric vehicles, when buying a car or booking an Uber, can make a difference. Electric vehicles are more energy efficient and cost considerably less to operate per mile.
During Summer Streets, bikers and pedestrians have free reign of Park Avenue from the Brooklyn Bridge to the top of Central Park. They are able to rent Citi Bikes as part of the city’s bike share program. Photos by Mira Ciganek.
Spread the Word
As simple as it sounds, educating yourself and others on climate change is extremely important. This could mean sharing reputable information on social media, attending events, reading books and more.
By the mere fact of living in New York City, we are able to maintain a relative level of environmental consciousness and activism. It is built into our daily lives, from reusable options at every store to easily accessible public transportation to climate-conscious public policy. But not everyone is as fortunate, nor as informed. So if you are able to do nothing else, spread the word.
“Talk to everybody you know about climate change,” Bluestone said. “The more we talk about it, the more it’s out in the open, the more people will want to take action about it.”
The 73-acre South Brooklyn Marine Terminal will be transformed by energy titans Equinor and BP into an operations hub for the vast offshore wind farms they’ve been contracted to build. According to a company spokesperson, when that happens it will bring “over 1,000 jobs to the area.”
The area in question is Sunset Park, a diasporic, post-industrial, perennially-polluted neighborhood peopled by Asian, Latinx and immigrant communities. An influx of green jobs would certainly be welcome there. But exactly how many jobs are we talking about? It depends on who you ask.
Lauren Shane, senior communications manager for Equinor Wind US, said it would be more than 1,000. At a community meeting Equinor hosted in February, a different company representative said the port upgrades would create 1,500 short-term jobs and 500 long-term jobs. Bklyner reported “1,000 short-term and 200 long-term jobs within the Sunset Park community and 5,200 jobs overall.” Mayor Eric Adams said the offshore wind industry will bring “13,000 local jobs over time,” when he announced the SBMT port transformation agreement in January.
“There are not that many jobs for folks of this community in the wind facility itself. There are ancillary jobs they’re looking to advertise locally: maintenance and janitorial. They need to staff the facility. Hopefully there will be local outreach,” Jeremy Laufer, the district manager for Community Board Seven, which represents Sunset Park, said.
“This community vision of taking the industrial waterfront so that it could start building for climate adaptation, mitigation and resilience is not new,” Elizabeth Yeampierre, the executive director of UPROSE, told Bklyner. “These are victories that don’t happen overnight.”
Sunset Park community organizations like UPROSE have for decades centered environmental justice in their fight for green-manufacturing jobs. Community Board Seven, which represents Sunset Park, has, too.
The SBMT deal was finalized by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and included several provisos. Equinor has agreed to contract with minority- and women-owned business enterprises for at least 30 percent of its supply chain needs. Furthermore, it will invest $5 million into an ecosystem fund that will “bring more New York City residents into offshore wind careers, propel offshore wind innovation, and support a just transition,” according to a mayoral press release.
The company has stated it will work towards opening an offshore wind learning center in Sunset Park, although it is not required to do so.
UPROSE in partnership with Community Board Seven and others led a successful 2019 opposition campaign against Industry City’s rezoning proposal for the SBMT, which is the city’s largest industrial waterfront, that the group and others believed would accelerate gentrification, displacement and economic inequality.
The organization wanted to maintain the waterfront’s industrial identity not least because, according to a report by former New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, 11.3 percent of private-sector jobs in Sunset Park are manufacturing related, the highest for any community in NYC.
“We recognize everything the community has fought for,” Shane, the senior communications manager, said.
But that doesn’t guarantee Sunset Park residents jobs or local businesses contracts with Equinor’s main suppliers.
Equinor has held three supply-chain expos since its bid for the Empire and Beacon Wind projects was approved in 2022.
“Our purpose is to bring in local companies,” Shane said, but when asked if Equinor requires Vestas, its turbine supplier, and Skanska USA, its construction manager, to work locally where possible, she said, “No.”
“It’s an ongoing collaboration,” Shane said.
It’s uncertain to whom jobs and supply-chain contracts will be given, but the work will vary.
Short-term jobs at SBMT will primarily include construction and staging, which is a term that describes the assembly of wind turbines.
Not all jobs will be short-term. “The wind farms will last at least 25 years,” Shane said.
Long-term jobs, though fewer in number, will include warehouse staff, control room operators and turbine technicians.
Many of the long-term jobs are expected to be union jobs.
“I want to see the unions recruiting in the neighborhood,” Laufer, the district manager, said.
Image courtesy of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The extensive proposal by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to fortify the New York harbor against storm surges has been met with a mix of eagerness and trepidation by most of the public. Yet in one of the most-impacted waterfront areas of the city, citizens are still oblivious.
The tentatively selected $52 billion Alternative 3b plan is still in its “preliminary” and “conceptual” planning stage, according to the USACE. But the window for public comment on the plan closed at the end of March after already being extended once, and the task of assuring the news reaches the public has been across the city.
One of many massive church gate structures slated for construction in 2030, the Arthur Kill barrier, would cut right through Tottenville Shore Park at the southern tip of Staten Island.
The views of the waterfront will be typified by the large-scale project, if it were to take place, all throughout New York’s boroughs. The plan features elevated promenades for the lower East side, like the vertical retaining walls lining where Manhattan meets the Hudson River, as well as levees, deployable flood barriers and underwater floodwalls in addition to 12 surge gates throughout Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
Like the others planned, the Arthur Kill barrier would feature a band of submerged vertical lift gates stretching about 3,300 feet from shore to shore. While they may usually be open to maintain tidal flow, these non-navigable auxiliary gates, as well as a navigable gated passage 800 feet wide at the center, are meant to protect homes and businesses all along the kill by closing in the event of major storm surge.
There’s little indication that Tottenville’s residents have any idea what’s being planned.
“I can safely say it’s honestly a little hard for us,” resident Chris Bradford said. “If it doesn’t show up in the press … you really don’t hear about it. Nobody’s going door to door to tell you, nobody goes to the community board meetings.”
The problem stems from the government inadequately notifying New Yorkers about the plan and its public comment period.
Other communities around the city where such gates are planned, including Jamaica Bay, Red Hook, Newtown and Flushing, caught wind of the projects and have held town hall meetings and have amplified public scrutiny thanks to outreach by river alliances and “friends of” groups’ continued divulgence. No such group has advocated for community involvement in Tottenville.
On the morning of March 26 at Conference House Park, none of the Tottenville residents approached were aware of the project. But after being given a brief summary of the plan — with the ravages of hurricane Sandy fresh in the community’s memory — many residents said they would support the project.
“It’s certainly the first I’m hearing about it,” Bob Winslow, a father of two living nearby, said. “But even with all the construction, it would sound like it would be a good thing. You know, for the long-term.”
Storm surge risk, heightened by the onset of increasingly frequent coastal storms exacerbated by climate change, was the subject of the NY & NJ Harbor Tributaries Study that started 10 years ago with the signing of the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013 by President Barack Obama. Alternative 3b is just one of five different solutions the Corps considered, ranging from building a massive floodwall to block off the entire harbor to doing nothing at all.
Local Vanessa Jones was quick to voice her support.
“It’s just going to get worse from here,” she said, beating dust off a rug in front of her home near the beach. “We can’t keep not doing anything and that’s really all Congress does.”
A joint statement on the project was sent to the USACE on behalf of various organizations, including the Newtown Creek Alliance, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy and seven others.
Listed in the statement on behalf of Staten Island’s Kill Van Kull and Arthur Kill was the Coalition for Wetlands & Forests. The coalition, a local environmental organization whose most recent public announcement dates back to 2021, and its silence on the issue leaves little assurance of community involvement or awareness despite the insertion in the joint statement. Every other community organization or alliance listed additionally hosted town hall meetings and presentations in collaboration with USACE representatives — the Coalition for Wetlands & Forests gave no such indication of engagement.
One of the statement’s chief concerns, echoed by other organizations as well, was that the tentatively selected plan neglects to incorporate sea-level rise, only adjusting to protect shorelines against expected storm surges.
It also outlined the “range of destructive ecological and social impacts that in-water
barriers would have,” including potential pollution, water flow disruption and a subsequent drop in water quality as well as the impacts of the construction process.
During Community Board 3’s monthly meeting on March 28, members passed a motion supporting a seven-foot-tall perimeter fence around a local park, approved a handful of liquor licenses and commented on some tree stumps that needed uprooting. Several other items were on the agenda. The Arthur Kill barrier was not one of them.
The board members did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, nor the aforementioned coalition.
“It’s a little bit of a shame that they’ve been so lowkey about it,” Bradford remarked. “Because I’m certain there would be a lot of opinions.”
It’s still undecided whether the USACE will be moving forward as recommendations from partners and the public will ultimately determine its fate. The Corps said a report will be released after it has processed public comments when it reaches the “Agency Decision Milestone” in June.
Opdyke speaks to a small group in the Climate Museum, a pop-up exhibit in SoHo. Photo curtesy of the Climate Museum.
By Caspar Gajewski
‘I got tired of standing outside the castle, yelling at the king.’
Queens-based artist David Opdyke talks about how he created “Someday, all this,” a collage of postcards of “hometowns and backyards and anonymous buildings, places where regular people live.” It is featured at the Climate Museum in SoHo.
This excerpt from an interview with the artist has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Obviously, the last few years have been difficult for all of us. The pandemic changed us, killed so many, made us afraid of contact with each other. And during that time, you spent countless hours and months working on your postcard murals, depicting various apocalyptic futures. So, I’d like to start on a personal note: How are you doing?
(Laughs.) I think I’m okay. But as it relates to working on those projects, it was not a problem. It was really great to dive into something that was so involved, so long term. It was a lot of work, but it was really engaging. I really enjoyed it. It was super rewarding. I had a lot of fun. I saw work on [the postcards] as super helpful, in a way.
You’ve called the 2000 election of George W. Bush a political awakening. It seems to have set off a flurry of nearly two decades of art obsessed with systems level thinking. Works like “Oil Empire” and “Prospect” are furious screeds against abuses of power, environmental despoliation and unfettered capitalism. But then, it seems to me, something happened in 2019, with “This Land,” your first postcard mural. Rather than centering systems, your postcard works center people and depict themWhat inspired this change? And do you see this shift in your own work, from an excoriation of American systems to the depiction of everyday lives?
DO: Yeah, definitely. Somewhere in 2015, I felt like I was painting myself into corners. Every time I was going to start a new project, I felt like I was sort of trying to create something out of thin air. I read a lot. I listen to a lot of news. So, it’s not as if there’s no information, no inputs. But in terms of the imagery, and what I was working on, it was always sort of self-generated, right? I needed something to riff on. It was a bit of a crisis. So, I just sort of stumbled onto them (the postcards) as a cheap kind of raw material with built in imagery and built in stories. And I just started working on them individually, which was really a great thing to have happen. And then the particularities of postcards, especially the ones from the early twentieth century, there’s a lot of hometown pride, there’s a local specificity to everything. All those accumulated stories were literally piling up in my studio because I was collecting hundreds of them. They have a kind of a collective story that led me to want to put them in a conglomerate. Independent of that was the fact that I got tired of standing outside the castle, yelling at the king, the evil king on the other side of the wall. And instead of focusing on that, I had all these postcards, all these hometowns and backyards and anonymous buildings, places where regular people live. It was more about taking all the things that I’m worried about, that we’re worried about, that we need to think about, and to start putting them in people’s backyards.
Recently, I spoke with Saskia Randle from the Climate Museum, where “Someday, all this” is exhibited, and she told me that when the museum approached you about displaying your work with the caveat that it be paired with action-oriented exhibits, you said you’d been looking for just that sort of opportunity. Why did you want your work to be at the Climate Museum and not, say, hanging in a gallery?
They’re totally separate kinds of venues, contexts and worlds. The art world is very, very small, and the way that people interact with things that they see in a gallery or museum is different. You go in as an individual viewer, engaging on a personal level with the thing you’re seeing. And then you feel something. You don’t get to interact. But with the Climate Museum—I don’t mean to minimize what I’ve done, but it is kind of like a shiny object that gets you in there and engages you, visually, emotionally, intellectually. But then you’re not left to go on with your life. There’s this whole other thing happening in the rest of the space, which gives you opportunities to take some action or learn something or think about larger issues or to think about the possibilities for collective action. It’s not just you individually interacting. And also I’m not restricting myself to an artsy audience. These are postcards. They’re sort of populist. They’ve got built-in, everyday nostalgia. They’re recognizable. There’s a particular feeling we have when we look at them. They’re unintimidating, not alienating, which allows me to smuggle all this stuff on top of them. In the context of the Climate Museum, it’s not just an art audience. Other people can come in and see it, and I think that’s great.
