Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis

by Ralph Rugoff (Foreword)

Artists from Agnes Denes to Hito Steyerl address ecology and humanity’s new imperative to reenchant the world Inspired by artist Otobong Nkanga’s suggestion that "caring is a form of resistance," this richly illustrated book highlights the ways in which artists are helping to reframe and deepen our psychological and spiritual responses to the climate crisis, hoping to inspire joy, empathy and a reenchantment with the world. The artists featured―including Andrea Bowers, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Agnes Denes, Otobong Nkanaga and Hito Steyerl―explore ecologies, ecosystems and climate-vulnerable communities across the globe. Newly commissioned essays by Rachel Thomas, Rebecca Solnit, and Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes investigate the notion of radical care and the history of climate-concerned art, while a tapestry of influential texts―old and new―weaves together the voices of the featured artists with other practitioners from the worlds of literature, climate activism and philosophy.

Genres: Art

175 pages, Paperback

Published September 26, 2023

Reviews

[Kailin Zen]

Rebecca Solnit’s essay in here is particularly poignant:

“At times of crisis, people want art to be a sort of wrench with which this particular screw of the individual or collective imagination can be loosened or tightened. Yet we dismiss media that does that as propaganda, a cousin to advertisement. It’s selling something, and mostly it wants you to buy. That is, such stuff tells you what to think — but it doesn’t help you to think, or to become a more thoughtful person, to value your own capacity for thought…”

“…Art can inform, but it has a larger task to make us the people we need to be to respond to crisis in the ways we must….to feel a part of all life on earth and solidarity with those far away in time and space; to perceive the beauty of the natural world and our utter inseparability from it; to remember the lessons of the past about how change works and where power lies….”

“…They want us to have gaping holes where our souls and greatest potential used to be….We need other kinds of human being….”

“…We need stories, too, that tell us how change really works….”

“…All this is to say that the work art has to do is broad and deep and subtle and matters immensely, and it does better not to build specific political outcomes, but the cultures, civilizations and values that generate those outcomes. It’s to say art is bigger than politics - or that politics is the weedy and sometimes flowering stuff that grows from the soil that is culture.”