The Brooklyn Rail

Climate Futurism brings together the work of artists Erica Deeman, Denice Frohman, and Olalekan Jeyifous. Curated by marine biologist and climate luminary Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the exhibition showcases newly commissioned works by all three artists as part of the Threshold Fellowship from Headlands Center for the Arts. Installed in the second and third floor galleries at Pioneer Works, the show is part of a growing movement that seeks to envision climate change as something other than an abstracted violence enacted upon distant landscapes. The three artists that make up this exhibition refuse to imagine a world without us, proposing instead visions of the future that embed it within a lived past.

Suspended in darkness, hundreds of shards form a shattered screen, catching and scattering the light of a projected film. Hand-molded pieces of gypsum hang from the ceiling at irregular heights like a giant wind chime, casting shadows on the back wall. With Give Us Back Our Bones (2022–23), Erica Deeman connects a fragmented past to the seeds of new futures. Each gypsum shard is roughly textured and unique, attached to a wooden frame with biodegradable fishing line and speckled with seeds of okra, rice, callaloo, and other plants of the Black diaspora. Taking inspiration from her maternal family’s journey from Jamaica to the UK as part of the Windrush Generation, Deeman’s work serves as a glass through which the past and future can be seen, darkly. Left outside, the sculpture would weather away and turn to seed, becoming a new part of the landscape, recalling Beverly Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins (1981), a quiet monument made of tabby and left to weather with the tides.

In the next room, two side-by-side neon signs in blue and red declare PUERTO RICO NO SE VENDE / PUERTO RICO IS NOT FOR SALE. In this installation, Denice Frohman considers the ongoing legacy and future of Puerto Rico and the colonial policies defining the island’s relationship with the United States. A poet and performer, this is Frohman’s first displayed work as a visual artist. Across from the signs, Frohman reads over video with clips from Cecilia Aldarondo’s Landfall (2020), showing landscapes of Puerto Rico before Hurricane Maria. On another wall, printed text declares “OUR TERMS HAVE CHANGED” with a paragraph of the Jones Act turned into blackout poetry side-by-side with an addendum from the artist. While Deeman’s work creates a portal between past and future, Frohman ties the past to our present concretely, highlighting contemporary issues of privatization on the island.

On the next floor, Olalekan Jeyifous’s Frozen Neighborhoods (2020–current) brings us thoroughly into the future. Jeyifous draws from legacies of architectural utopianism, sci-fi, and Afro-futurism to construct a truly multi-media installation. Jeyifous uses 3D printing, digital photomontage, laser cutting, and VR to depict a world that is “solar-punk meets salvage punk.” At the entrance, prints show laughing, smiling Black women driving large machines through lush landscapes and orchards. One of the machines could almost be made today: an adapted tractor, well used and marked with graffiti, a greenhouse, solar panels, and a water tower. Another—also 3D printed in the gallery—is clearly from an imagined future, taking the form of a personal quadcopter with space for a single pilot and cargo, less weathered than the tractor but still mechanical, with exposed tubes and ventilation. Within the gallery, wallpaper and VR show a Brooklyn bursting with greenery, with well-worn and tagged signs adorning buildings under a clear blue sky. Jeyifous’s utopia isn’t sterile or polished; it is inhabited, adaptive, and overgrown, imperfect but filled with joy.

The show is framed as a response to Dr. Johnson’s forthcoming book, What If We Get It Right?, in which she asks us to imagine life on the other side of the climate crisis. The answer is not a technocratic future like those proposed by twentieth-century science fiction, but one that emerges from and remembers the histories of the Black, brown, and queer people who have for centuries found ways to inhabit new, unfamiliar, and ever-changing landscapes.