Vanishing Ice: Interpretive Activism About Climate Change in Museum Practices

• In Event: 60.067 - Collaborative Art and Activism for Eco-Justice Education

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how museum practices can be powerful tools for interpretive activism, which is understood as entry points into conversations about pressing contemporary concerns, such as climate change. Considering theories of social art practice, participatory museum practice, and place-based education, this paper addresses the question: How can arts-based museum practices provide different ways of telling stories and inviting conversations around and engagement with contemporary environmental issues?
Perspective
In the fall and winter of 2013-2014, the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington presented a traveling exhibition and programmatic event titled Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1776-2012 (Matilsky, 2013; http://www.vanishing-ice.org/). Vanishing Ice was designed to be interwoven with community-based educational, interpretive, and activist programming regarding climate change in the style of socially engaged art practices (Bishop, 2012; Jackson, 2011). The programmatic and curatorial elements link place and activism through an accompanying exhibition focused on the location of the exhibition. This public curriculum style of museum programming (Vallance, 1995) allows entry points to issues of changing climate, such as access to fresh water and diminishing salmon populations.
In this paper, Vanishing Ice is explored as an example of ways in which museum interpretative practices, such as exhibition curation and educational programming, are mobilized for environmental activism and place-based education. Within the context of social art practices and the art encounter (Beech, 2010), interpretive activism in museums is a participatory process, where engaging with an exhibition is simply one node of interaction within a larger network of possible activities and potential outcomes. Understanding that “[c]limate change is truly a cultural challenge, [as] it affects all of us and we all need to become part of the solution” (Buckland, 2012, p. 140), Vanishing Ice, in a public curriculum model, engages scientific, environmental, economic, and cultural issues through arts-based, participatory narratives.
Mode of inquiry and data sources
Utilizing networked document analysis (Prior, 2008) and theoretical inquiry, this paper brings together praxis-based threads of the pedagogical turn (Bishop, 2012; Kalin, 2012; O’Neill & Wilson, 2010), socially engaged art practices (Jackson, 2011), participatory museum practices (Ellsworth, 2005; Simon, 2010), and place-based climate change activism (Buckland, 2012). Data sources include the Vanishing Ice website, catalog, educational and interpretive programming materials, and marketing materials, as well as relevant theoretical texts and works of art.
Warrants for arguments and scholarly significance
Narratives of climate change are made more intelligible when shared and produced in as many modes–scientific, economic, arts-based–as possible in order to communicate immediate and potential impacts to many people (Matilsky, 2013). Likewise, museum practices need to be understood as more than simply people visiting objects in a gallery; rather, interpretive activism calls attention to the long-term, and often intangible impacts of museum exhibitions and programming. Vanishing Ice is considered as an exemplary model of these existing and potential practices.

Author

• Elsa Lenz Kothe, The University of British Columbia