Climate Stories: Lynn Cazabon, Leigh Davis, Sondra Arkin & Ellyn Weiss/The Human Flood, and Lionel Frazier White III
January 24 - March 29, 2025
Exhibition Reception: Friday, February 21, 5-7 p.m.
The Climate Stories exhibition, running from January 24 to March 29, 2025, at Salisbury University Art Galleries (SUAG) Downtown, brings together art addressing climate-issues and human responses. SUAG partners with SU’s Environmental Studies department to demonstrate the necessity of interdisciplinary partnerships in addressing climate change, offering a broader collaborative lens for our collective wicked problem. By combining environmental and scientific insights with artistic expression, collaborations like this can engage communities more effectively and more widely.
Recent events, such as the wildfires in Los Angeles and catastrophic flooding in Asheville, NC, represent the increasing frequency and disasters and our collective vulnerability when facing them. This exhibition provides audiences with the contemplative space of the art gallery to process emotions, such as grief and anxiety, triggered while processing the consequences of weather disasters and learning more about ways to act.
As weather emergencies trigger negative responses on top of trauma, arts programming that creates more positive associations and constructive ways of thinking about wicked problems offers a unique area for transformation through changing hearts and minds and encouraging personal agency. Art can serve as a powerful tool for climate advocacy by catalyzing emotional connections and motivating action.
Events
All events are free and open to the public, no need to RSVP! show up and have fun.
Exhibition Reception
Friday, February 21, 5-7pm, Downtown Gallery
Artist Talk with Lynn Cazabon
Thursday, February 20, 5:30pm, Downtown Gallery
Storytelling for Climate Change with Shane Hall
Wednesday, March 5, 5:30pm, Downtown Gallery
Storytelling is a powerful way people connect to the reality of climate change and what it means for their communities. Personal storytelling can help communities take up bold conversations and build more resilience in the face of climate change. Join us for this interactive workshop where you'll listen to personal "climate stories" and begin to tell your own.
Artist Talk with Sondra Arkin & Ellyn Weiss from The Human Flood, and Lionel Frazier White III
Thursday, March 27, 5:30pm, Downtown Gallery
Wicomico River Stories with Gina Bloodworth and Shane Hall
Saturday, March 29, 1pm, Downtown Gallery
The place we now call Salisbury has always shaped-- and been shaped by-- the Wicomico River. Join our "mobile classroom" to explore the often-overlooked stories and features of Salisbury's downtown and waterfront. Through reflective dialogue and participant observation, we'll connect with the past, present, and future of the river and those who call it home.
Meet the Artists
-
Emotional Climate is a text-based, participatory artwork by artist Lynn Cazabon that has at its center short statements from a wide variety of people expressing the emotions they are experiencing in response to climate change and its impacts. The exhibition in the Salisbury University Art Gallery will display printed and animated statements from the initial realization of the project in Queensland, Australia, made possible by a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award in early 2024. Cazabon chose Queensland due to the unique constellation of environmental and economic factors the state encompasses, as home to vulnerable ecosystems in its tropical rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef, as well as its economic reliance on industries that contribute to climate change impacts, such as coal extraction, beef production, and tourism. Showing this work in Salisbury offers a glimpse into the global scale of the climate crisis.
-
Leigh Davis makes interdisciplinary work to explore themes of grief, memory, and storytelling. Delving into how these shared human experiences shape our understanding of identity, over the past decade she has archived end-of-life experiences, shaping them into a diverse body of work spanning lecture-performances, video essays, installations, and sculptures which aim to illuminate the emotional complexities of grief and the construction of beliefs regarding human consciousness.
Her project Inquiry into the ELE (2016-2019) premiered at BRIC Contemporary Art (Brooklyn). Her site-specific audio installation, Vigil (2020), and video installation, Feeling Tones (2023), showcased at Green-Wood Cemetery (Brooklyn). Davis has exhibited work nationally at Open Source (Brooklyn), Spectral Lines (New York), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), EFA Project Space (New York), Oliver Art Center (Oakland), and the Kreeger Museum (DC). She has created performances for Dixon Place (New York) and Sound Scene at the Hirshhorn Museum (DC). A native of Pittsburgh, she currently serves as a Part-Time Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design, and divides her time between Brooklyn, NY, and Washington, DC.
-
Ellyn Weiss is a Washington DC-based visual artist and independent curator who has shown widely for more than 25 years. She is committed to engagement with the most pressing issues that face us, notably global climate change and the rights of women.
Ellyn has mounted collaborative installations on the melting of the polar icecaps (National Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC and the McLean Project for the Arts, McLean, VA); the destruction of coral reefs (Artists and Makers, Rockville, MD); and the movement of tropical diseases northward as the climate changes (Otis Street Arts Project, Mt. Rainier, MD).
The Human Flood continues that series. It is focused on the migration of millions of people globally caused or exacerbated by the climate catastrophes - drought, floods, excessive heat, sea level rise - that have made their homes uninhabitable.
Ellyn co-founded an artists’ collective formed in 2017 called ArtWatchDC, to use visual tools to resist attacks on fundamental democratic ideals. As part of that mission, she conceived the One House Project, a collaboration of 300 artists building a house structure paneled with artwork celebrating the journeys of each of their ancestors to a new world. Houses were built and shown in Washington, DC (Touchstone Gallery 2017) and Germantown, MD, (BlackRock Center for the Arts, 2018-9).
Ellyn and Sondra N. Arkin curated a series of four group shows beginning in 2009 called the Zeitgeist Exhibitions, each themed around an issue that was of particular salience at that moment in time, ranging from pervasive surveillance to the effects on the human brain of endless streams of digital information and the meaning of the election of America’s first African-American President.
Ellyn serves on the Board of Directors of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national environmental and science organization and is past President of the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. She was founding Board President of the Touchstone Foundation for the Arts in DC, which provides fellowships to local emerging artists and exhibition opportunities for nontraditional artist stories. She was one of the founders of Artomatic, an episodic artistic free-for-all begun in 1999.
-
Washington D.C. artist Sondra N. Arkin’s work explores space, connections, and boundaries in both paintings and sculpture. In paintings, prints, and drawings, the luminous surfaces, imbued with atmosphere, explore the same points of connection of her ethereal orbs of steel that are organized in site-specific installations.
While not overtly representational, the work explores thematic content related to human-nature interactions, often highlighting what viewers might overlook. Her most recent collaborative project, The Human Flood, with Ellyn Weiss, uses a variety of media to explore human migration underway due to acute and chronic climate-related changes to environments.
Arkin has participated in many exhibitions in both galleries and museums, and her work has been represented in a number of private, corporate, and public collections including the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies Program, the DC Art Bank, and public art in Crystal City, Virginia. She has been awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities multiple times.
In addition, as Curator of the DC City Hall Art Collection, she assembled a remarkable collection that includes many of the finest artists who have lived in the nation’s capital. As the largest permanent collection of regional art on public display, it constitutes a unique resource. She has curated many independent projects, regularly programs alternative arts spaces, and is deeply involved in the mid-Atlantic arts community having served on the boards of Artomatic, Mid City Artists, Millennium Arts Salon, and Art Enables.
-
Lionel Frazier White III (b. Washington, DC; lives and works in Washington, DC) is a Washington, DC, native; arts educator; and interdisciplinary conceptual artist who works in painting, drawing, wood sculpture, installation, and mixed media collage. White’s work explores themes of forced and coerced labor and their effect on family pathology, erasure, displacement, reassertion, and gentrification. White holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from the George Washington University Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (2018) and is a graduate of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts high school in Washington, DC. His work has been exhibited at the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities, Prince George’s African American Art Museum and Cultural Center, Torpedo Factory |Connect The Dots, Rush Arts Galleries, and Area 405. White was a 2019 Halcyon Arts Lab Cohort 3 Fellow in Residence in Washington, DC.
