Connecting the Dots Between Climate Dismay and Environmental Action

Update: In late 2024, the Climate Museum secured a permanent new home in Hudson Yards, New York. It's slated to open in 2029.

At the Climate Museum’s first of a series of pop-up spaces, which opened in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood in 2022, exiting visitors are asked to select one of a dozen round stickers with “action pledges” like these:   

I’m going to … spend time in green spaces.
I’m going to … talk about climate more.
I’m going to … volunteer or join a climate group.
I’m going to … vote climate.

Once they’ve chosen their dot (or written a custom pledge on a blank one), visitors place it on a large, white wall alongside a staggering number of other colorful stickers. Stepping back from the wall, the pledges become an installation in their own right—a dynamic, ever-growing mural of optimism and action toward a more sustainable future.

This co-creative energy among art-makers and art-observers is at the very core of what the Climate Museum’s founder and director, Miranda Massie, aims to achieve. “There is a profound kind of resolve in the act of creating for other people something that is beautiful and meaningful, and that form of determination is, for me, really the measure of what optimism is,” she says. “We need that optimism in climate activism, right now.”  

The Climate Museum is the first museum in the United States wholly dedicated to climate change art and cultural programming. Since its first exhibition at the Parsons School of Design in New York City in 2017, the Museum has presented seven art exhibitions and hosted more than 300 events, which is especially remarkable considering the Climate Museum does not yet have its own permanent space.

Massie and her team are working toward securing a dedicated building in New York City, but for now, its peripatetic nature allows the Climate Museum to stay nimble, responsive, and relevant as public opinion about climate change shifts rapidly—and artistic responses to the challenge proliferate. “The field of climate-engaged art is growing, and it’s spreading across different mediums,” says Massie.

To make curatorial decisions at the Climate Museum, Massie has enlisted the help of Mellon-supported postdoctoral fellows with expertise in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities. Current fellows include Dr. Samira Siddique, whose research on the humanitarian politics of the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh informs her climate-justice public programming work at the Climate Museum, and Dr. John Linstrom, a poet who is developing content and outreach efforts that highlight both human and more-than-human stories and visions for climate justice.

“Mellon Fellows have led the development of our discussion series on topics at the intersection of climate and inequality, such as grief, displacement, infrastructure, food, law, identity, and more, and they are playing key roles in the preparation of the framework for our upcoming exhibition on the intertwined histories of inequality and climate disruption in modernity,” says Massie.

The Climate Museum’s first major exhibition, Taking Action (2019), was hosted at Governors Island, a historic military base in New York Harbor. The emphasis of that exhibition was on carbon-mitigation efforts and visualizing the collective nature of effective climate action. Visitor feedback, along with crucial input from Dr. Akua Banful and Dr. Dilshanie Perera, the first participating Mellon Fellows in 2020, helped Massie’s team iterate the core structure of future projects, including the SoHo pop-up.

Now, the Climate Museum offers a three-step experience.

“The arts are how we experience ourselves as a communal species. Art is built into how we feel ourselves to be connected to each other,” Massie says. “And in order to take action that feels meaningful, you really have to feel connected to other people who are also taking action that is meaningful. At the Museum, we’re striving to create that virtuous spiral.”

For example, visitors to the SoHo pop-up are first invited to engage with visual artist David Opdyke’s Someday, all this (2021), a mural made of hand-modified postcards.

“David’s piece depicts an apocalyptic near-future with elements of wryness and humor. It’s fundamentally a warning, and yet because it’s so beautiful and it works so well intellectually, people don’t come away from it feeling depressed,” Massie says. “They come away from it feeling opened up to the world, which is ultimately the power that art has.”

Second, visitors are shown facts about the myth of American climate indifference, based on a study by researchers at Boston College, Indiana University Bloomington, and Princeton. The study found that Americans in all fifty states significantly underestimate public support for far-reaching policies to combat climate change. In some parts of the country, the discrepancy between perceived and actual support for green policies is jaw-dropping, which inspired Massie’s team to share the research in close parallel with Opdyke’s work.

Finally, after absorbing both the art and social science elements of the exhibition, pop-up visitors are asked to commit to one specific climate action in their personal lives and stick their pledges to the wall.  

“In the past we’ve tried art without action scaffolding that gives people a sense of how they can imagine their own role as climate protagonists, but when you do that, it’s not sufficient,” says Massie. “It’s remarkably hard for people to start taking climate action. We encourage the beginning of that journey.”

The Climate Museum’s innovative approach to fusing art, science, and personal action is drawing attention from other cultural institutions. Massie’s team, along with the Mellon Fellows, are actively co-designing exhibits and events in collaboration with other museums, research centers, and universities. They’re also exploring opportunities for traveling exhibits beyond the East Coast.

For Massie, the Climate Museum is the culmination of a life spent advocating for social causes. A former civil rights litigator in Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York City, Massie was serving as interim director at a nonprofit social justice organization in New York when Hurricane Sandy hit the city in 2012. The experience had a profound effect on her and was the final push in what had been a years-long gnawing pull toward climate advocacy. (Massie credits Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, as a strong influence in her own personal activation.) She began sketching out early plans for the Museum shortly after the storm.

From the beginning, Massie knew art would play a key role in the Museum’s mission. She grew up in an arts household, with a silkscreen-artist mother and photographer father who read poetry to her every day as they walked to the school bus. “Art is built into the foundation of my psychology,” she says.

Her artistic heart is protected by the tough skin of a longtime lawyer. “Being in those open fights in court and winning some great victories built my confidence,” she says. “With a great team, there’s very little you can’t accomplish.”