The Brooklyn Rail

Nine contemporary artists explore the origins and consequences of the climate crisis through textiles, sculptures, paintings, installations, drawings, videos, and even scents in Displacement at the MassArt Art Museum. Humans have decidedly altered their environments; how those altered environments are in turn displacing humans and other animals through forced migrations triggered by habitat instability, accelerated by this decade’s upsurge in heatwaves, floods, and fires across the globe, is a theme each of these artists tackle. Considering the grim topic, Displacement is a surprisingly entertaining show. For Lisa Tung, the executive director and lead curator of MAAM, that is the point. Who better, she asks, than artists with vivid storytelling tools at their command to shed light on this sprawling, complex subject for a confused and skeptical public? The artists in Displacement do so with a kaleidoscopic mix of humor, wonder, pathos, technical verve, and even, at times, a dash of hope.

Displacement comes in two parts. The first explains how we arrived at this climate crisis through the voracious consumption of fossil fuels. Canadian artist SandraSawatzky narrates this timeline through The Black Gold Tapestry (2008-17), visually unfolding the geologic origins of the fossil fuel industry and the history of its use by humans right up to the present. The work is a gigantic piece of embroidery, hand-sewn by the artist. At 219 feet long, it rivals the epic, eleventh century Bayeux Tapestry, on which it was modeled. Taking up the second floor of the exhibit, The Black Gold Tapestry starts in the Mesozoic era and goes through the Second World War, ending with a section showing wind turbines that intimate the demise of the fossil fuel era. Charming yet jaw-dropping in ambition and scale, Sawatzky’s tapestry features dinosaurs dancing above and below the central story line, which illustrates the scientific discoveries and technological innovations that made coal, gas, and oil indispensable resources not just for energy but also for a host of industrial products we now take for granted.

A witty sequence shows the British chemist William Henry Perkin’s accidental discovery in 1856 of aniline dyes which he produced from coal tar derivatives. The text says, “WILLIAM PERKIN MADE THE WASTE INTO SYNTHETIC DYE SPARKING A CRAZE FOR MAUVE AND CHEMISTRY.” The word “MAUVE” is embroidered in that color while directly below we see Queen Victoria decked out in a vivid purple dress. Perkin’s experiments not only launched a fashion revolution but also led to a host of industrial applications, from plastics to medicine, for fossilized carbon. On the same floor, the architecture and design team LOT-EK provides seating made from deconstructed cargo containers, the ubiquitous building blocks of a global marketplace that runs on oil.

On the museum’s first floor, the remaining artists tell the story of the present perils we face. Just outside the museum’s entrance, Justin Brice’s LED message board, We Are the Asteroid II (2018), flashes aphorisms pertaining to the climate crisis, e.g. “GOODBYE ARCTIC ICE.” Ellie Schmidt’s elegiac video Sandcastles (2020) consists of meditative shots taken on Nantucket Island, now threatened by sea-level rise even as its inhabitants go about business as usual, such as golfing, a pursuit notorious for its waste of land and water. In the ironic final scene, given Nantucket’s vulnerability to erosion by the Atlantic Ocean, we see surfers riding the waves. Maya Watanabe’s single-channel video installation Zhùr (2024) is a series of filmed close-ups of a 57,000-year-old wolf cub that was recently revealed, perfectly preserved, by the thawing Yukon permafrost. Watanabe’s eerie images of fur, hide, and teeth serve as a metaphor for the dawning of a new and more savage climate era. Katie Paterson joins past and future in her immersive olfactory piece, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), an installation consisting of two smoldering bespoke sticks of incense. One imitates the smell of a fire in the world’s earliest forest based on the fossil evidence from Cairo, New York, while the other imitates the smell of the burning Amazon forests that are currently turning these immense biodiverse ecosystems into grasslands as the region dries up and its trees go extinct. Akea Brionne’s stunning assemblage, Begin Again: Land of Enchantment (2024) brings fabric, glitter, and rhinestones into a haunting image of three women sitting with suitcases in the middle of a desert. The piece serves as a metaphor for her family’s move from Belize to New Orleans, a migration driven by the strain of increasingly severe droughts and floods impacting Central America.

The remaining two artists deliver critical insight on how the climate crisis directly results from the New World slave trade and its plantations, whose patterns of indiscriminate growth and extraction became models for today’s global economy. Imani Jacqueline Brown’s What remains at the ends of the earth? (2022) is a hypnotic video installation with projected images that show the devastation of Louisiana’s gulf coast wrought by the petrochemical industry’s extensive oil and gas pipelines. Brown shows that the lands once worked by enslaved laborers have now become disappearing shorelines as the latter form of exploitation follows on the heels of its predecessor. In addition to his assemblages of found objects, Nguyen Smith offers a drawing, BundleHouse Borderlines No. 3 (Isle de Tribamartica) (2017), which combines the lands of Trinidad, Cuba, Martinique, Haiti, and Jamaica into a mythical Isle de Tribamartica dotted with tiny makeshift structures. Playful yet deadly serious, the work is an allegory about the forced migrations, whether through enslavement or subsequent colonial oppression, in the Caribbean, whose ecological fragility Smith sees as ground zero for the climate crisis. Smith and Brown celebrate the resilience and resourcefulness of the Black diaspora as a beacon of hope for surviving the climate displacements already taking place worldwide.