“Humans are too big,” Mill Valley–based artist Sarah Bird told me, paraphrasing the philosopher Donna Haraway, in a 2019 interview for this column. “We’ve consumed too many of the resources of the rest of our web of being.” Bird hoped to comment on human overconsumption by projecting a photograph of a redwood tree somewhere in the urban environment—at full scale.
One night this April, Bird achieved it. A glimmering visage of one of these giants appeared, for 90 minutes, on the San Francisco Ferry Building’s 245-foot-tall clock tower. Temporarily, Bird brought together the architectural and the arboreal. Bird isn’t trying to replace our experiences in the forest. Rather, she seeks to give us an additional perspective; it is difficult to experience the whole of a redwood from the forest floor. But Bird lets us glimpse the tree’s immensity. Perhaps humility or awe follows.
Bird’s drive to shift her viewers’ perspective has been a recurring theme in the dozens of conversations I’ve had with visual artists, dancers, musicians, filmmakers, and architects since this column launched in 2018. Through their work, I saw how art can transform our understanding of the natural world, or our relationship with it. In this final installment of the column, I look back at some of the art that stayed with me.
Many of these artists compel us to reexamine the present more carefully. One of my first interviews was with artist Tanja Geis, who also holds a master’s in marine and coastal management and makes place-based video art, drawings, and sculptures, often focused on marine environments. Geis argued that while scientific data often doesn’t result in changed behaviors, art can help us pay attention to the world, thereby transforming our perspective or helping us empathize. Musician Cheryl E. Leonard, who plays rocks and shells as instruments and records the sound of thawing lakes, hopes that her music encourages listeners to slow down and attend to nature’s music around us. In these examples, art is a beacon or a magnifying glass—choose your metaphor—that highlights the treasures around us.
This kind of attentiveness takes time to bear fruit. Musician Ellen Reid worked with Kronos Quartet and other musicians to create Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK, a GPS-enabled app (available through June 2024) that plays location-specific music as one walks around Golden Gate Park. The result is a unique soundtrack tailored to one’s own walk through the park. Thinking of Golden Gate Park as a work of art, Reid says the app can help people slow down so that they can “see more of the details of the existing work of art.”
Others make art and architecture that look toward the future. Researchers at California College of the Arts and Moss Landing Marine Laboratories created the Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab, an experimental vessel tasked with addressing sea level rise. The undulating vessel, about the size of a small car, gives researchers insights into how underwater fouling communities—invertebrate hangers-on that attach themselves to the lab—can help absorb and dissipate energy from waves during storms. The Float Lab seeks a vision for adaptation driven by creative design. These researchers ask how design can make coastal communities safe in the future.
In her 2022 exhibition at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato, Elisheva Biernoff demonstrates how art can aspire to the utopian. Her interactive exhibition gave visitors the opportunity to imagine their own vision for a local wetlands restoration project—letting them move magnets of local flora and fauna, or agricultural and architectural elements, around on the landscape. By providing the elements of a potential environment, Biernoff makes a case for democratic participation in restoration and land use.
These artists recognize that art alone is not enough to heal our planet and communities. Art is nonetheless limitless in its power to reorient and inspire. In her bold abstract landscape paintings, African American painter Shara Mays honors, and reimagines, her ancestors’ relationship with the land. In her work, art and nature come together to envision the conditions for a better world. She told me that “by painting landscapes, I was paying homage to the people in my life who deserve transcendence, beyond the limitations of racism that they faced when they were alive.” Mays described painting as an act of freedom in itself. “I have no restrictions in my practice, and that’s because this is my space.”
