Climate Museum pops up in SoHo, capital of buying stuff
On a 60-degree Saturday in December — no longer unseasonably warm in Manhattan by today’s climate standards — hordes of vacationers flooded the upscale shopping center that is SoHo. On a street full of luxury stores like Chanel and Canada Goose, a young woman stood handing out free coffee to lure people to a storefront that has nothing – or perhaps everything – to do with conspicuous consumption.
After bouncing from pop-up to pop-up in New York City for the past five years, the Climate Museum has found a new temporary home (through April) at 105 Wooster Street in a 4,200-square-foot, 13- foot-high attic space with skylight.
Using a mix of information panels and artwork, the free museum hopes to educate the public about climate change, create community and encourage people to take social action. For his new exhibition “The end of fossil fuels”, a lenticular map depicts the world in black, white and gray. On the left you can see which countries produce the most emissions. On the right, viewers can see which countries are most affected by climate change. They are not aligned.
Another part of the exhibit features a map of New York City, showing the neighborhoods most affected by real estate redlining in the 1930s, where mortgage lenders would not lend, further exacerbating racial inequality. became bigger. When visitors move an overlapping panel, they see that those same areas are now the hottest in the city in the summer months – sometimes 30 degrees warmer than more affluent white neighborhoods due to a lack of trees and air conditioning.
Visitors to the museum include casual tourists, student groups and people making a pilgrimage to assuage their existential fears. “I didn’t really know what to expect,” said Stefanie Joseph, who came from Brooklyn to watch it with her boyfriend, Queens resident Christopher Richards. “But we are deeply impressed. I mean, this mural alone is phenomenal.”
Joseph waved at the artwork anchoring the exhibition, a dynamic 10-by-40-foot painting—three subway trains long—created by an author and illustrator in Stone Mountain, Georgia, R. Gregory Christie.
The mural evolves from a black-and-white scene from America’s industrial past – with smokestacks and chains – to a brighter colored present, in which people break the chains and gradually transform into vines. The final part depicts a utopian dream, filled with houses, trees and flowers, with a great hand sowing the seeds for the future.
When the museum contacted Christie last year to create a piece for the exhibition, he told them he was too busy. The artist behind one of the Kwanzaa stamps issued by the United States Postal Service was illustrating four children’s books and working on a painting of Harriet Tubman for the Booth Western Art Museum in Georgia. But the creator and director of the Climate Museum, Miranda Massie, did not take no for an answer.
Christie, a former New Yorker who moved to Georgia a decade ago, visited for the show’s opening in October and was overcome with emotion.
“When I was in the School of Visual Arts, SoHo was filled with galleries, not shops,” Christie said. “My dream was always to be in one of those galleries. Now I can say I had a show in SoHo. But it’s more than that. It’s something that helps change the world and how people think about the world. SoHo needs this.”
Massie, a former social justice attorney, got the idea for the Climate Museum after Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012. Although a similar museum existed in Hong Kong, this was one of the first in the United States. There are now climate museums in Chicago, Houston, Germany and the Philippines, as well as temporary and permanent climate exhibits in science museums around the world.
The nonprofit Climate Museum started a decade ago in a small office space in Midtown East and developed educational and arts programs throughout New York City. The first official exhibition was held at the New School and featured polar ice cores. The museum occupied a space on Governors Island and then ended up in SoHo in a smaller space a block away from its current location, where it exhibited the work of David Opdyke, a Queens-based artist known for his criticism of American culture and politics. But when this larger space opened, museum officials jumped.
Sophia Lee, a sustainability strategist from Philadelphia, saw the museum on Instagram and visited by train with a friend and her 3-year-old son, who came to the exhibit armed with his toy Captain America shield. As he and his mother enjoyed a copy of “The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge” in one of the museum’s two reading rooms, Lee discussed that challenge.
“It’s existential,” Lee said. “I was here because of the forest fires when the sky was completely dark and yellow. And I thought, ‘The dystopian future is here,'” she added, thinking of the smoke from wildfires in Canada drifting over New York. “In a museum like this we find ourselves in a kind of echo chamber. It’s not the people at Exxon who are causing the problem. The question is how we can make our voices heard to those who can change things.”
“The oil companies want us to think, ‘If you recycle that plastic bottle, we can change where things go,’” Lee said. ‘I want to say ‘No’. She added: “They are very smart and pushing their agenda.”
Recycling, composting and using public transport are all important, but without limits on the fossil fuel industry and current food systems the climate crisis will not be solved, scientists say.
Cynthia Rosenzweig, a board member of the Climate Museum and a senior researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said fossil fuels are about 70 percent of the problem. “People like to say there is no silver bullet to solve climate change,” she said. “It must be a silver hail.”
Dr. Rosenzweig said getting the science in the exhibits right is essential, but that’s not enough. “We as scientists have been talking about climate change for a long time,” she said. “But science alone will not solve the problem. I know that. I lived that.” Science, she said, calls on people’s brains. But art appeals to people’s emotions. “Then there’s the third part: creating a sense of community,” she said. “And the museum speaks to all three.”
Camilo Cardenas and Maos Gonzalez, artists from Colombia, came by not only to view the exhibition, but also to find out if they could rent the space one evening for a networking party. The science behind climate change is known at this point, they said. It is a matter of appealing to people on an emotional level to force change. “Some days I feel like we are losing the battle. But we have to move forward and not feel like we are doomed,” Gonzalez said.
“The planet is like a dog with fleas,” Cardenas said. “It will upset us if we don’t do anything.” He added that “the language spoken by scientists and ordinary people is different. A museum like this – and art – is the connection between them.”
Massie said the museum’s mission is to educate the public and push them to take civic action — from calling on elected officials, to proposing a climate justice-themed book in their book groups, to pushing for climate content in their children’s schools. However, the goal is not to encourage civil disobedience. Massie doesn’t think disruptive protests, like people gluing their hands to visual art in museums, are the best way to empower the public — though she understands the motivation behind it.
“We are in the middle of a planetary emergency,” she said. “If we can start talking about it, we can move forward and make ourselves feel less paralyzed and more powerful.”
The final section of the museum includes a postcard station where visitors are encouraged to write to their representatives in Congress. (The museum pays the shipping costs.) On a recent field trip, a group of art students from the Pratt Institute used the museum’s iPads to look up the names and addresses of their representatives and demand that they No promise for fossil fuels, denying major campaign contributions from oil, gas and coal companies.
Massie is open to a long-term lease for the Wooster Street space, provided she can find philanthropists and corporate donors to help foot the bill. The museum is currently funded by the Mellon, Ford and Waverley Street foundations, but has also received donations from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Foundation, the Hilo Foundation and the Rockefeller family. Less than 2 percent of all charitable donations go to the climate goal, Massie said. “It is not part of the existing portfolio.”
András Szántó, museum consultant and author of ‘Envisioning the future museum’ said funding was just one of the challenges facing the Climate Museum. Finding good art that can also convey a specific message “in a poignant way” is not an easy task, he said.
The other challenge, Szántó said, is determining what kind of building the museum should be in: “Should you even have your own building? It would be strange to build a big, shiny new building to tell the story of sustainability. That would be a deep disconnect. The idea of a pop-up is itself an environmental statement.”
Massie also believes that any permanent new space should set an example for sustainability. “But we burn a lot of carbon because we have to move every six months,” she said.
The museum’s current landlord, David Zar, who helps run his family’s Manhattan real estate empire, said he would be happy if it stayed beyond May. He said he turned down two commercial tenants for the space, including a Michelin-starred restaurant, even though they offered more rent than the Climate Museum. (Zar declined to disclose the discount on the museum’s rent, but similar spaces in the area are fetching more than $100,000 a month, according to real estate agents.)
“You have to care about the future,” said Zar, a father of five, “whether you are in it or not.”
The end of fossil fuels
Through April 28, 2024, The Climate Museum, 105 Wooster Street, SoHo, 917-551-6670; climatemuseum.org.