Description

The Project :
At the Foundation’s invitation, the Anchorage Museum (AM) proposes to organize a convening, Landscape of Change , to explore ways of connecting art museum collections with current issues around climate change and the environment. The AM will organize a three-day conference in Anchorage with participants representing cross-disciplinary work in art museums, place-based museums, and academic museums from across the U.S. and abroad. Working from the premise that museums should be responsive to audiences and the global issues that impact them, the convened will explore models for art-based research, presentation, and programming that addresses climate change, environment, indigeneity, and decolonization.
The conference content will be structured around the AM’s three areas of focus related to climate change: Prototype (creating examples of future solutions); Respond (language, visuals, voices and action); and Connect (connections between people and places, and connection to landscape as a way to understand, build awareness, and respond to climate and global change). The sessions will be anchored in discussions of changing environments, their interrogation through contemporary works of art, and their contextualization in pre-modern landscape art, traditional indigenous art, and archives. While the AM’s collections and much of the dialogue will center on the North and its distinct environment, participants will represent institutions in a range of environmental settings, each with distinctive collections and audiences.
Artists will be key participants in sessions on accessing collections for research and cross-disciplinary projects that address climate change, indigenous knowledge, and possible futures. Community curation and community-based learning will be among the modes of practice considered throughout the convening; and the perspectives of scientists and local change makers will figure prominently. The convening will also include specialist-based sessions for directors, curators, collection managers, and educators in order to promote ongoing communication and collaboration.
Conference goals include: knowledge sharing; new connections among artists, museum specialists, and scientists; the identification of two pilot collaborations; and the groundwork for the creation of an annual convening.
Rationale for Funding :
The AM has already established itself as a leader in the work of connecting art, collections, and museum practice to the pressing issues of climate change and environment. Its director, Julie Decker, has developed the AM as a major cultural center of the Circumpolar North, and a leader in the advancement of adventurous climate-centric work in the contemporary art field and in the cross-disciplinary exploration of environment, indigeneity and community. The AM is strengthened by its longstanding affiliations, as the first regional office of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History Arctic Studies Center (since 1992) and an affiliate of the National Museum of the American Indian.
Already a successful grantee of the Foundation’s American Art Program (2016), the AM is a highly productive organization which originates about 20 exhibitions (often touring) each year, as well as publications and programs, related to Arctic peoples and landscapes. It has launched major initiatives focused on solutions for positive futures in the face of climate change, and international convenings (including the North x North Festival, Design Week, and Wilderness Week) that have led to enduring relationships and collaborations.
The Museum’s energetic emphasis on indigenous voices, underserved populations, environmental futures, design thinking, and innovation has placed it at the center of developing art-and-climate-based conversations across the globe. The AM’s work to date has established the framework of practice that will allow it to launch the proposed convening at an advanced conceptual level and follow through in extending the impact of the conference.