Browse the California Arts & Climate Archive

A research and design lab in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design that works on policy and design for just environments before and after disasters. Directed by Danielle Zoe Rivera, the lab centers hazard mitigation for under-resourced communities and co-produces research with them. In California it has studied the flood history of the Pájaro Valley with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, shown in an April 2025 exhibit at Bauer Wurster Hall that combined archival research, a flood timeline and maps, and it has worked on recovery after the Los Angeles fires. The lab began in 2018 at the University of Colorado Boulder under the name Comunidad and took its current name after moving to Berkeley in 2021.

A group exhibition at UC Irvine's University Art Galleries that treats climate change as an interlocking crisis bound up with economic and social justice, from extraction presented as green transition to the forced migration, detention and deportation of people displaced by rising seas and neo-colonial regimes. Curated by Juli Carson, Annika Haas and Sasha Ussef, it drew on Jack Halberstam's idea of 'unworlding' and Bernard Stiegler's notion of the neganthropocene to ask how a livable life might be imagined within present conditions of collapse. Works by Marwa Arsanios, Ashley Hunt, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and virgil b/g taylor were installed in the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, accompanied by an opening reception and a day-long workshop, 'Collapse as a Condition of (Un)Knowing.' The show launched the first phase of The Neganthropocene, a three-part research project led by Carson under the UC Climate Action Arts Network.

Artist Statement: We are dyeing wool with dyestuff from invasive and non-native plants growing on Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands archipelago in California, investigating the complex and intertwined influence humans have on our ecosystems, and the aesthetic, emotional, magical, and medicinal interrelationships between humans, plants and color. The wool is spun into yarn, the yarn woven into shawls. In addition, we are constructing a database of natural dye colors and various methods for visualizing and organizing that data, using a wide range of systematics, from scientific to alchemical. The organisms (many plants and one insect, cochineal) we are working with, were brought to the island over an extended period of time, starting when it was first colonized by Europeans. New organisms were still consciously introduced in the late 20th century. For example, cochineal (coincidentally a very important source of red dye) was brought to the island in the late sixties to help kill off the cactuses which were considered a hazard to the cows grazing on the island. The human immigrants had a relationship to these organisms in their home lands for millennia, many of these plants have been used for food, medicine, magic and dyes. Just as with humans, some behave better than others when arriving in a new land. Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes about Broadleaf plantain with affection in “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.” To her, plantain is a model citizen, a foreign-born who is not colonizing. It’s a generous and healing newcomer, who is truly listening to the new environment. Other plants are infamous for wreaking havoc in the eco-systems they “invade”. On Santa Cruz Island, fennel, a sweet smelling, delicious plant, which is highly medicinal, traditionally used for protection magic and yields a magical yellow color, has taken over large swaths of land to the detriment of the native flora. It is now one of the many plants targeted for eradication from the island in a major conservation effort aiming to restore it to a more (real or perceived) natural state. The sheep breeds producing the wool and yarns we are working with have an historical connection to Santa Cruz Island. It’s believed that the Santa Cruz Island sheep breed stems from sheep of several breeds, potentially including Merino, Rambouillet (a French version of Merino), and English Leicester, brought to Santa Cruz Island in the mid 19th century for wool and meat production. Over the years, the sheep increased in numbers and became feral, causing massive erosion to the landscape. In the nineties, consistent with restoration efforts on the island, the sheep, then in the tens of thousands, were eradicated. Due to the methods used (very few sheep were brought to the mainland, most were shot on the island) the endemic Santa Cruz Island breed has ironically become one of the five most critically endangered breeds on the Livestock Conservancy's conservation priority list. The wool from these sheep speaks about the landscape where the individual sheep lead their lives and the breed emerged. Its staple length and crimp, the soil and vegetable matter trapped in it, reveals something about the sheep, the breed and their environment (craftspeople now speak of the 'terroir' of wool.) Interlopings: Invasive Species / Endemic Breeds is a process-based collaborative art project combining traditional techniques such as dyeing, spinning and weaving, with data visualization and ‘performative science’ and ‘relational aesthetics’ strategies. The public is invited to participate in the process through workshops and exhibitions and to have a direct visual, olfactory and tactile experience with animals and plants that have been introduced to the island. By smelling and touching the wool, inspecting the insects and vegetable matter stuck to it, getting dazzled by rich and subtle colors given to us by the plants and sensing the warmth from the finished shawls, the audience-participants inadvertently explore a wide array of topics. They might gain insights into issues ranging from aspects of the natural and cultural history of the Channel Islands and conservation, to topics related to the Anthropocene and chemistry. Some of the questions this project evoke are: How do we define what a “native” species is? When was 'wild'? How do we decide where species belong? What animals 'deserve' our protection? What is the goal with conservation? What ends justifies what means? (Growing up in Sweden in the seventies, we marched to the catchy chant “sluta spruta” - stop spraying, while the children today learn that one of the most significant dangers to our natural environment are alien species.) While these issues will be discussed in the workshops and exhibitions, this is an art project relying on visual, tactile, and olfactory modalities of generating meaning. As such the most important questions will be asked, and maybe answered, in the direct experiences of hands, noses, and eyes and in the relationships created between people and between people, processes and materials.

A long-term art research project that has worked since 2017 in the industrialized high-altitude deserts of northern Chile's Atacama. There, copper and lithium mining for global supply chains reshapes a former seabed with rare geologic and living systems. Drawing on intensive fieldwork, the artists build multichannel sound, video, photography, live audiovisual performance and installation, and use mirage and perceptual distortion rather than documentary to question the idea of the desert as wasteland. They also note that the region has served as a Mars-analog test site. Works include Salar: Evaporation (2020), shown in the group exhibition Against Outer Space at UC Irvine's Beall Center for Art + Technology, and Salar: Adaptation, presented at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in 2024. A feature film and an artist book are in progress.

An experimental intermedia performance combining dance, live music, projected media and visual design, created in response to the beauty of oceans and coastlines and to the damage human activity does to marine ecosystems. Directed by John Crawford with composer and violinist Mari Kimura and four choreographers, the roughly 80-minute work set live dancers and musicians against processed video shot at ocean and coastal sites, in four sections titled Emergence, Gyre, Oil Slick and Refuge. It premiered at the Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL) in UC Irvine's Contemporary Arts Center and was produced by the Institute for 21st Century Creativity, with scenic elements and animations developed in a UCI/RISD collaboratory course. An expanded version was presented at Brown University's Granoff Center in April 2019, and the project frames its aims around climate justice and the inclusion of diverse voices.

A public sculpture and working fog catcher made of eight amorphous, cloud-like rings, each strung with copper mesh that weathers to a sky-blue color. Coastal fog condenses on the mesh, and the water drips into the soil below to nourish the surrounding wetland plantings. The sculpture was made by artist Anja Ulfeldt for UC Santa Cruz's Art+Fog Collective, and microbiologist and environmental toxicologist Peter Weiss-Penzias tested the water it gathered. It was installed in December 2024 in the marshlands around Younger Lagoon, just west of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, as part of restoration efforts there.

A 71-minute documentary that begins when the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires force Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens to evacuate their home in the Boulder Creek redwoods. From there, the artists approach fire as an element to relate to and care for rather than only fight. Mixing humor, grief and performance art, the film draws on firefighters (including formerly incarcerated firefighters), Indigenous scholars, ecologists, artists and a witch therapist, and part of the narration is voiced by a mythical white peacock named Albert. It connects California's wildfires and climate change to questions of social justice and ends with a ceremonial wedding to fire in the redwoods. It is the third film in the pair's ecosexual series, after Goodbye Gauley Mountain (2014) and Water Makes Us Wet (2019). It premiered at Frameline49 at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco on June 20, 2025.

A group exhibition that treated apocalypse as something many communities have already lived through, by way of colonialism, displacement and genocide, rather than as a coming event. It brought together artists whose work traces the roots of present social and environmental injustice and imagines just, ecologically sustainable alternatives. Works included Amy Balkin's People's Archive of Sinking and Melting, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman's video proposal for a cross-border environmental commons at the Tijuana River estuary, Laurie Palmer's solar-powered discussion table Public Sun / Arendt's Table, and Newton Harrison's maps of Mediterranean pollution. The exhibition was guest curated by T. J. Demos at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. It was the culminating exhibition of UC Santa Cruz's year-long, Mellon-funded Beyond the End of the World project, organized with The Humanities Institute and the Center for Creative Ecologies.

A free, interactive online atlas that traces the ecologies that arise when nonhuman beings become entangled with human infrastructures, which its editors argue are the substance of the Anthropocene. Readers move through the atlas along routes of "detonators," "tippers" and "feral qualities." Along the way they find nearly 80 field reports by scientists and humanists alongside video, artwork, poetry and music, as well as a reading room and curriculum suggestions. The project was curated and edited by UC Santa Cruz anthropologist Anna Tsing with Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, and published as a digital book by Stanford University Press. ArtReview ranked it 15th on its 2020 Power 100 list.

Led by UC San Diego composer Lei Liang and Qualcomm Institute engineer Falko Kuester, this interdisciplinary initiative brings together music composition students and researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography to explore the creative possibilities of marine science. Through a collaborative seminar, participants translate underwater recordings and scientific imaging—including Arctic ice formations, whale echolocation, and coral reef scans—into original musical compositions and immersive experiences. Projects include a virtual reality sound installation presented at the Qualcomm Institute’s SunCAVE in 2018 and a 2019 performance by the Mivos Quartet and students featuring compositions informed by Arctic field recordings.

Led by UCLA artist Victoria Vesna in collaboration with the Science Visualization Lab at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, this immersive art–science installation explores the effects of human activity on marine ecosystems. Drawing on 3D imaging of plankton and underwater sound recordings, the work transforms microscopic organisms into monumental forms while revealing the acoustic disturbances caused by ships, sonar, and offshore extraction. An interactive balance board allows visitors to influence the underwater environment through their movements, connecting physical balance to ecological vulnerability. First developed as a video in 2017, the project evolved into interactive 3D and virtual reality experiences and was presented at the 2019 SIGGRAPH Art Gallery in Los Angeles, among other international venues.

A speculative hybrid creature built from roughly 2,000 pounds of e-waste gathered around the Bay Area, staged by Jill Miller and Asma Kazmi, who work together as the Missing Object Library. Cables, server racks, monitors and cooling units recreate the look of a server farm, while animated video traces the materials back to the rare earth mines they came from; smaller 'offspring' forms made of lithium, cobalt and silicon appeared on lobby monitors. The work pushes back on the idea that the cloud, big data and AI are weightless, pointing to their energy demands, extraction and labor. A first version was installed in October 2023; the full installation filled the Gray Area Gallery in San Francisco from April 22 to July 20, 2025, commissioned through Gray Area's C/Change program with Goethe-Institut San Francisco and supported in part by the UC Berkeley Center for New Media and UC Berkeley Surplus.

A series of six guided, embodied exercises by Zheng Bo that invite participants to move beyond a human-centered view of the world and connect with other living things, especially plants. They include Collecting Tree Qi, Drinking Sun Exercise, Drawing Weeds Practice and Sacred Grove Ritual; some are the artist's own, and others draw on practices from other cultures. The series was presented in 2021 in his exhibition Wanwu Council at Gropius Bau, Berlin, and Zheng Bo is among the artists in Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology at La Galería, UC Merced (2025).

This work is an outdoor projection-mapping installation commissioned by the UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art. Over two nights in April 2024, images of late 19th- and early 20th-century California landscape paintings from the museum's collection, among them Granville Redmond's California Landscape with Flowers and Hanson Duvall Puthuff's Mystical Hills, were projected onto the buildings of UC Irvine's School of Social Sciences, setting painted light against dusk and night and building to a finale overlooking Aldrich Park. The French title means "outdoors in the outdoors"; the project was presented with the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and the School of Social Sciences. Plein-Air en Plein Air builds on the curatorial activities of another project commissioned by Langson IMCA, Beyond the Frame: Impressions of California, created by the design studio Imaginary Places. This immersive virtual presentation features images of the same 28 California Impressionist paintings and sets them in a stylized digital landscape with associated artists’ biographies, literary and historical texts, archival images, and environmental sound elements. Together, these two very different projects work to catalyze curiosity and foster conversation and exploration of California Art in the public realm.

A two-part group exhibition at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, curated by Michaëla Mohrmann, on Southern California's built environment and the policies and power dynamics that shape how the public experiences it, from urban neglect in Los Angeles and freeways that divide neighborhoods to the environmental cost of UC Irvine's Brutalist architecture. Part one paired newly acquired photographs from Ruben Ochoa's ficus series (2007) with works by Carlos Almaraz and Pat Gomez from the museum's collection, tracing how generations of Chicano artists have shown the harm California's infrastructure and urban policies cause to communities of color. Part two, in April 2026, was a pop-up of Ochoa's Class: C (2001), a Chevy van converted into a mobile gallery, showing work by UC Irvine artists Sean Duffy, Beatrice von Rague Schleyer and André Woodward at the Irvine Barclay Theatre Plaza.

Curated by James Nisbet at UC Irvine’s Langson Orange County Museum of Art, this exhibition examines California’s changing ecosystems through plein-air landscape paintings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Featuring more than 40 works drawn from the museum’s holdings and the James Irvine Swinden Family Collection, the exhibition considers how artists documented landscapes during a period preceding widespread urbanization and environmental transformation. Organized around native wildflowers, Orange County landscapes, California missions, mountain environments, and trees, the exhibition connects historical representations of place with contemporary concerns about invasive species, biodiversity, and habitat loss. California Certified Field Botanist Justin Felder contributed botanical identifications and ecological perspectives, while a newly commissioned sound installation, Landscape Hocket (Orange County) (2025), by Andrew Weathers extends the exhibition’s exploration of landscape through sound.

A three-year research and pedagogical project of the South Asia Art Initiative at the Institute for South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley, supported by the Getty Foundation's Connecting Art Histories initiative. It reconsiders the relation between nature and culture in art history, treating them not as opposing domains but as categories produced together through histories of matter, mobility, imagination and power. Through public programs, field-based workshops and collaborative research with a global cohort of scholars and practitioners, it aims to build a lexicon for South Asian art histories grounded in climate, decolonization and planetary thought.

A floor sculpture by Anirudh Shaktawat, a heap of rubble (brick, concrete and lime) measuring 66 × 150 inches, from his series Chaumasa: Four Months of Monsoon. It is the featured image of Language of Nature, Language of Culture: Towards a Decolonial Art History, the South Asia Art Initiative's research project at UC Berkeley.

An artist's book and photographic installation by Latipa (Michelle Dizon), with poetry by Việt Lê, made from an archive of National Geographic magazines from the 1960s and earlier. Dizon erased most of the text on each page, leaving fragments that form a decolonial counterpoint to the magazine's imperialist, Western-centric images of people and lands, and Lê added original poetry and a text on the legacies of war and empire. The book was published in 2018 by at land's edge (Los Angeles), Candor Arts (Chicago) and Sming Sming Books (Bay Area), and the work was exhibited at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, from March 20 to July 31, 2018.

A multi-image slide installation by Latipa (Michelle Dizon) built from photographs of the U.S. colonial and postcolonial Philippines, drawn from archives in the Philippines and the United States, the artist's family albums and the internet. It takes the form of a conversation between the artist's great-great-grandmother in 1905 and a descendant in 2123, both named Latipa; the future Latipa lives after climate catastrophe has made Earth uninhabitable and is traveling to Proxima B. Setting official archival photographs against intimate family images, the work links colonial harm to people and to the environment and traces how its effects outlast colonial rule. It was shown in the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowships exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 2018 and at the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in 2019.

A seven-channel video installation by Latipa, then working as Michelle Dizon, from her ongoing series on imperialism, neocolonialism and globalization in the Philippines. Footage shot over four years in the Philippines is combined with archival film, philosophical, political and literary texts and field recordings, moving through sites near former U.S. military bases, multinational resource extraction, with chapters on mining, fishing and banana plantation labor, and war-torn regions of the southern Philippines. Developed as a Lab Artist project at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, and curated there by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, it was shown from June 18 to September 7, 2012, and was also presented as a live performance with narration and a live score at the Hammer Museum during Made in L.A. 2012. The artist later founded the Memory and Resistance Laboratory at UC Riverside.

The eighth Human Impacts Salon, an evening of multimedia conversation and live art on new approaches to climate change, from decision-making apps and video games to algae fuel, organized by the Human Impacts Institute with the Transatlantic Climate Bridge of the German Embassy. Panelists included Greg Niemeyer, Program Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, a sponsor of the event; Georg Maue of the German Embassy; artist and educator Zakiya Harris; Joshua Sheridan Fouts of Bioneers; Jason Rissman of OpenIDEO; and Ashel Eldridge of Earth Amplified, who also performed live art with Helen Wicks.

A data animation by UC Berkeley artist and professor Greg Niemeyer, shown nightly on the crown screen of Salesforce Tower, San Francisco, throughout December 2024, and all night around the winter solstice. Built in Blender with Python, it condenses a year of open data, from the summer solstice of 2023 to that of 2024, into rhythms of the Bay Area: rainfall, wind, tides, sea surface temperature, air quality, foliage, seismic activity, solar radiation and BART ridership. The data came from NASA, NOAA, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and the Berkeley Seismology Lab, among others, and NASA program scientist Chelle Gentemann advised on the satellite data. The work was invited through the Day for Night Monthly Artist Program.

A public program pairing a walking tour of the UC Santa Barbara Campus Lagoon, led by Katja Seltmann, Katherine Esau Director of the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration, with a walk-through of the exhibition Jackie Amézquita: Gemidos de la Tierra at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, led by curator Ana Briz. The museum and the Cheadle Center organized the program in conjunction with Amézquita's 2026 residency in ecological practice, which centers on native ecosystems, plant pollination and soil remediation on campus and at the Santa Cruz Island Reserve.

An exhibition at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara, drawn from the archive of Environmental Communications (EC), a 1970s Venice Beach collective of architects, artists and sociologists who argued for an architecture of whole urban environments rather than single buildings. Through photographic slides, booklets and videos distributed to architecture schools and libraries across the country, EC documented consumer society and the counterculture that resisted it, with Los Angeles, its smog, suburbs, street art and Pop architecture, as a central subject. The exhibition also reflects on the 2025 fires in the Palisades and Altadena.

An exhibition at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara, of work by Los Angeles–based artist Jackie Amézquita, rooted in land-based methods and ancestral material knowledge. At its center is Gemidos de la Tierra (Wailings of the Land/Soil) (2020–ongoing), in which she hand-casts the names of people who died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody from 2003 to the present, each name made from soil gathered in the state where the person died, combined with masa, salt and rainwater. Amézquita is the 2026 Artist in Residence of Ecological Practice at UCSB's Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration, and her fieldwork on campus and at the Santa Cruz Island Reserve, on native ecosystems, plant pollination and soil remediation, informs a newly commissioned work for the exhibition. Names of people who have died in recent years are to be added during a Día de Muertos activation on November 1, 2026.

The first major survey of Bonnie Ora Sherk (1945–2021), an artist, environmental educator and landscape planner in the first generation of California conceptual and performance artists. It traces her work on art and ecology in public space, including Portable Parks I–III (1970, with Howard Levine), which turned San Francisco's urban "dead spaces" into temporary green environments, and The Farm (Crossroads Community), the experimental community art and ecology center she directed from 1974 to 1980 on land fragmented by freeway construction. In this exhibition, newly transferred film and video were shown with photographs, collages, works on paper, artist books and ephemera from the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition was first organized by Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco, and took place at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara.

Mounds and rivulets of adobe spread across sheets of paper laid in archival flat files, made by Christine Howard Sandoval, a member of the Chalon Indian Nation. Set out like an archive, the earth asks what records of land and memory can hold. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz, alongside her The First Color Is Red.

A video by Suné Woods made after her 2024 visit to Coquí, on Colombia’s Gulf of Tribugá, where she observed humpback whale biopsies alongside marine ecologist Dr. Natalia Botero-Acosta. Centering the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous knowledge of the region, the work asks what it means to learn from other species. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz.

A triptych video installation by Mia Eve Rollow that layers new footage, archival images, and news media around the tides and the symbolic life of the sea across cultures to explore ocean ecologies. One passage follows a whale fall, the carcass of a whale sustaining deep-sea life. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz.

Sixty-three pages of hand-dyed paper by Christine Howard Sandoval, a member of the Chalon Indian Nation, blind-embossed with faint phrases in her Chalon Ohlone ancestral language. Rising across the wall in bands of color, the pages touch on plant medicine, Indigenous knowledge, and the harms of colonization. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz, alongside her Fourth Person Singular.

Photographs of the legs and feet of displaced women in Medellín, Colombia, by Colombian artist and physician Libia Posada, each marked with an inked map of the journey that took the woman from her home. The maps trade compass points for right and left and measure distance in strides, recording displacement as it is carried in the body. Posada first exhibited Signos Cardinales in 2009; this version was shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz.

A garden built within the footprint of a solitary confinement cell and planted at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz, by artist and prison abolitionist Jackie Sumell in collaboration with Tim Young. Part of Sumell’s Solitary Gardens project and the IAS Visualizing Abolition initiative, the work turns the architecture of isolation into a space of growth and care.

A multimedia installation by Sharon Daniel that traces the climate crisis as lived in Kivalina, an Iñupiat village on a barrier island in northwest Alaska, through oral testimonies, archival images, and ice core scans. A long lit table holds photographs, documents, timelines, and a vintage radio beneath a wall-sized image of the village. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz.

A sound and video installation by the Whale Liberation Front, the collective of Imani Jacqueline Brown, Cory Diane, and Peter J. Bowling, that imagines how whales in the Gulf of Mexico experience the seismic airgun blasts used to search for oil and gas. Water fills an inverted oil drum with images playing across its surface and a hydrophone hanging above it, beside a hand-painted map of the Gulf marked with alternative place names. Members of the collective also performed a live electroacoustic piece with zither, synthesizers, voice, water, and rare recordings of Gulf whale song at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz.

Sixty ceramic sperm whale teeth heaped on a wooden shipping pallet, part of the BREACH series that Shinnecock artist Courtney M. Leonard began in 2014 to explore the many meanings of the word breach. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz, the work questions US environmental policy and economics and points to the role of industrial shipping in whale deaths.

A handmade fishing net embroidered with the eye of a humpback whale, made by artist Carolina Caycedo for Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz. The net turns the whale’s gaze back on the viewer, pointing to how commercial fishing gear entangles and kills whales while honoring small-scale subsistence fishing as a more sustainable way of living with the sea.

An exhibition at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine, curated by David Familian and Jens Hauser, on synthetic biology and wetware, in which artists use laboratory methods to come close to life. The works included synthetic amino acid necklaces, protocells that mimic the movement of phytoplankton, bacteria that generate power for a synthesizer, a desktop gene machine, and an artificially grown brain in a vat, and Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand and Anna Dumitriu made new works in residencies developed with UC Irvine research centers. Questioning human-centered views of engineered artificial life and the responsibilities they carry, the show asked how aliveness is defined in terms of components, circuits, and systems.

A mid-career survey at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine, curated by David Familian, of Ian Ingram's robotic objects from 1998 to 2021, which borrow the forms and behaviors of animals and are often made to live alongside them and speak with them in their own habitats, from earlier robots built for a raven, a lizard, or a worm to Danger, Squirrel Nutkin! (2009) and Duck, Duck, Goose (2007). New work made during his residency at the Beall's Black Box Projects turned to synanthropic animals, especially rats, that live closest to people, and to how they use built environments in search of facsimiles of ancestral landscapes, probing the boundary between constructed and grown places and the possibilities of interspecies communication and coexistence. During the run, the Beall's 2022 Art + Ecology series brought Ingram into conversation with collaborators Steve Mahler and Charissa Terranova in Just Your Garden Variety Robots, alongside talks by Carolina Caycedo and land artist Hans Baumann.

An exhibition at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine, co-curated by Antoinette LaFarge and Jesse Colin Jackson, presenting artists who experiment in the marginal areas where art-making, practice-based research, and scholarship meet. Some stage their work in laboratories, some in studios, and some in wild or abandoned landscapes, and together they question how culture continues to marginalize artists who work across disciplines. Their subjects range across glacial ice, fungal life, nuclear waste, genetics, and settler colonialism. Krista-Leigh Davis's performance video No Claim to the Blue-Green Bloom (2023) follows life-size microbes through the wilderness as they adapt to a toxic environment, and Jennifer Willet's Gentleman Scientist: Microecologies (2023–25) turns to microbial ecologies. The artists were featured in LaFarge and Jackson's anthology Experimental Practices in Interdisciplinary Art: Engaging the Margins (Brill, 2024), which launched with the exhibition.

An immersive installation built from core elements of Sensorium for the World Ocean, the long-term project of the late environmental artist Newton Harrison (1932–2022), directed by Joshua Harrison with Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin. It premiered in 2024 at the AlloSphere, a three-story spherical research instrument in the California NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara, as a satellite to the UC Irvine Beall Center's Getty PST ART exhibition Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, and ran by reservation into April 2025. With an original spatialized composition and an interactive data world, it turns climate and ocean-health data from the Ocean Health Index of the Halpern Lab at UCSB's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management into a multisensory experience, modeling how deepwater fishing, atmospheric particulates, weather, and other natural and human forces interact to shape the ocean, along with the political, economic, and social pressures upon it. True to Harrison's intent, it aims to leave audiences with a sense of hope. A project of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure with Virtual Planet Technologies, Almost Human Media, and the AlloSphere Research Group.

The Beall Center for Art + Technology's exhibition for Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide, curated by David Familian, offering artistic frameworks for understanding complex systems, which churn between order and chaos and generate feedback loops, self-organization, and uncertain behavior. From climate change and global warming to evolutionary biology, bacterial intelligence, data surveillance, financial collapse, and immigration politics, the works considered phenomena too entwined to be observed individually. Gail Wight explored how ocean acidification drives rapid evolution in aquatic microbial communities, and Theresa Schubert examined how the expansion of digital infrastructure feeds global temperature rise. Laura Splan, Chico MacMurtrie, Hege Tapio, Gail Wight, and the collective Cesar & Lois created new commissions through the Beall's Black Box Projects residency, which pairs visiting artists with UC Irvine researchers. A satellite installation, Sketches of Sensorium, drawn from Newton Harrison's Sensorium for the World Ocean, was presented at the AlloSphere at UC Santa Barbara.

An exhibition at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine, curated by Zachary Korol Gold, that traces a sensibility among contemporary artists who treat ecology not as a settled set of facts but as a system of images. Eleven artists, among them Lauren Bon, Maru García, Sean Raspet, Jeffrey Stuker, and Diana Thater, take divergent paths through the technologies, histories, and fictions by which environments and organisms are known. By turning the technical images and devices used to measure environments back on themselves, their works picture how contemporary society produces its ecological view, and the exhibition asks how people, through technology and as technical beings, sense and represent the living world.

A live performance at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, created by students in African American Studies 152: Major Voices in Black World Literature, taught in the museum's galleries by Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp, chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance, during the 2025 run of Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice. Through a multimodal curriculum, students read Tina Campt's Listening to Images, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, and LaToya Ruby Frazier's Flint Is Family in Three Acts, which documents the Flint water crisis, and explored writing, singing, and dance with Professor Bhumi Patel, using breathwork as a way of staying grounded while engaging climate and social justice. The course culminated in a public performance in the galleries alongside Frazier's photographs, a meditation on breath, identity, resistance, and the power of listening that wove poetry, movement, and voice to confront injustice and affirm resilience, agency, and spirit. Students' responses were also added to the exhibition as a soundscape visitors could reach by QR code, and the museum documented the project in a short video.

A large steel sculpture by Beatriz Cortez, associate professor of art at UC Davis, commissioned for the exhibition Entangled Writing (August 8 – December 29, 2024) at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, curated by Susie Kantor. Measuring twelve by eighteen feet, the work belongs to Cortez's exploration of life across different times and possible futures, drawing on whaling history, icebergs, and a volcanic eruption in El Salvador; its title names Hansbukta, a bay on Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic. The exhibition grew from early conversations between Cortez and Los Angeles artist Phillip Byrne, and in the galleries her sculpture stood in conversation with his Before We Become Spirals, made from salvaged transoceanic cable casings, asking viewers to consider what humans leave behind.

An exhibition at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, on how fire and fire stewardship could reshape California's landscapes. It was created by UC Davis landscape architecture and environmental design professors Brett Milligan and Emily Schlickman and grew from their book Design by Fire: Resistance, Co-Creation, and Retreat in the Pyrocene (2023). Built in collaboration with artists and ecologists, it gathered images and objects on the history of wildfire in the western United States, including firefighting helmets and burnt objects, a projected video of prescribed burns, and a large glass case staging three possible fire futures, ranging from Indigenous land stewardship and cultural burning reshaping the U.S. Forest Service to worsening megafires if emissions go unchecked. Visitors pinned their homes on a large map of high fire-risk zones, shared their own experiences of wildfire in journals, and took home fire-themed postcards proposing alternatives to Smokey Bear, among them Burnie the Bobcat, a mascot who would light good fires rather than fight them. A billboard on Interstate 80 between Sacramento and Davis carried the message “Only you can decide our fiery future,” and an online journal at pyrofutures.com extended the conversation beyond the museum.

A one-afternoon presentation at BAMPFA curated by first-year students in UC Berkeley Professor Sugata Ray's Fall 2023 College of Letters & Science First-Year Pathways course, Art and Climate Change. Using the museum's Five Tables format, the students set out works from the BAMPFA collection that reflect, mediate, and delve into the interconnected ecologies of life, asking what art, architecture, design, and performance can offer to debates on climate change and environmental justice in a time of nuclear disasters, acid rain, and mass extinction. Moving from early modern landscapes and colonial photography to contemporary art and eco-activism, the selection explored decolonial histories and radical futures attentive to Indigenous epistemologies, interspecies friendships, the desires of nonhuman life forms, and other ways of being marginalized by colonialism, capitalism, and the economies of natural resource extraction. Among the works was Marine Scene (1840), an oil painting by an unknown artist of sailing ships and steamships together on a rough sea.

The Los Angeles River is one of the most threatened rivers in the United States, much of it confined to a concrete channel in the name of flood control and progress. Juniper Harrower’s LA River Project draws on more than 2,000 environmental DNA experiments and long conversations with people who care for the river, an approach the artist describes as listening more than collecting. Working with museum-held specimens, Harrower took only minimal samples and imaged them under an electron microscope. Those images, gilded and drawn, wind through a 14-foot painted riverscape in which water, willow, and coyote merge into a single body. The work proposes a science practiced in relation to the river rather than through extraction, and gestures toward the rematriation movements of the Gabrielino/Tongva and Tataviam peoples. Two works from the project were shown in the Fifty-Third Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition at BAMPFA (May 10 – July 23, 2023): the painting Resting and raging through histories of containment, made with Los Angeles River water, watercolor, ink, graphite, California-sourced gold dust, and scanning electron imagery in research collaboration with CALeDNA; and Necklace for a River, a necklace made with Savannah Hunter Jewelry whose beads hold specimens of the river's animals and plants, from red-eared slider turtle and western toad to great blue heron, red willow, and Pacific salmon, strung with Los Angeles River concrete and steel beads used in DNA extraction. The necklace specimens were ethically sourced from the Norris Center for Natural History at UC Santa Cruz, with support from OpenLab and the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute.

The healthcare sector is one of the largest contributors to waste in the United States, generating more than five million tons annually. Approximately 85% of this material is classified as noninfectious, yet much of it is sent to landfills rather than recovered, recycled, or reused. In response to this environmental challenge, UCSF and UCSF Health launched a creative initiative inviting participants to transform discarded medical and everyday materials into works of art. Selected artworks have been exhibited across campus and medical center locations, bringing greater visibility to the possibilities of creative reuse. The initiative seeks to engage the diverse UCSF community in conversations about environmental responsibility while encouraging participants to reconsider patterns of consumption and disposal in healthcare settings. By connecting artistic experimentation with sustainable practices, the project invites new perspectives on waste reduction, resource recovery, and the transition toward a more environmentally responsible future.

An installation by Samuel Wildman that covers a gallery wall with nightlights, each topped with a cast porcelain flame, arranged in the pattern of a map of major California wildfires. Turning a familiar object of comfort into a warning, the work is what Wildman calls an expression of “the affective experience of climate change.” It was shown in the Fifty-Third Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition at BAMPFA (May 10 – July 23, 2023), alongside his altered tiles and soap dishes on the ties between consumption, comfort, and the policies that govern water and waste.

An augmented reality work by Tiare Ribeaux and Qianqian Ye, part of their ongoing Kai-Hai series, that imagines the remediation and restoration of water and soil at Kapūkakī (Red Hill) and Pu‘uloa (Pearl Harbor) on O‘ahu as a hopeful alternative to the story of fuel contamination. Made of digital images with 3D renders, it was shown in the Fifty-Third Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition at BAMPFA (May 10 – July 23, 2023).

A short fiction film by Tiare Ribeaux, a moving-image artist of Indigenous Hawaiian ancestry, about a weaver who slowly realizes her drinking water has been poisoned after a fuel spill at Kapūkakī (Red Hill) on O‘ahu. Drawing on Indigenous weaving and creation stories, the twelve-minute video traces the interconnectedness of water, bodies, and ancestral land. It was shown in the Fifty-Third Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition at BAMPFA (May 10 – July 23, 2023).

Photographs Richard Misrach made in the days after the October 1991 firestorm that swept through the Oakland and Berkeley hills, shown at BAM/PFA to mark the fire's twentieth anniversary. The Bay Area photographer entered the fire zone with an eight-by-ten-inch view camera, recording both stark vistas and intimate details of destroyed homes: a melted refrigerator, a mailbox, a stairway, a swimming pool among scorched trees. The forty photographs, unseen in the twenty years since the fire, included fourteen large-scale prints whose immense scale invites viewers into Misrach's quiet elegies, and a grid of twenty-six smaller prints forming an elegy wall. The Oakland Museum of California presented its own forty-photograph selection at the same time, and many of the prints entered BAM/PFA's collection as gifts of the artist. A companion exhibition, Richard Misrach: Photographs from the Collection, drew on series such as Desert Cantos and Bravo 20 Bombing Range that explore the complex relationship between humans and nature.

A collaborative artist residency and exhibition project that sent eight leading artists to eight threatened UNESCO World Heritage sites to make new work about the relationships between fragile natural environments and the human communities that depend on them. Co-organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego with the international conservation organization Rare, it opened in San Diego in 2008 before coming to Berkeley, and each artist completed two or more residencies between 2005 and 2008. Mark Dion built a supply cart for the under-resourced rangers of Komodo National Park in Indonesia. Ann Hamilton created a poetic text performed by Galápagos schoolchildren, heard against footage of a wavering ocean horizon. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle filmed in Baja California's El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, a gray whale breeding ground threatened by industrial development. Marcos Ramírez ERRE built a wall with residents of Yunnan's Three Parallel Rivers using regional methods, set with video windows onto their lives. Rigo 23 worked with artisans in Brazil's Atlantic Forest to remake a cluster bomb and a nuclear submarine in traditional materials as celebrations of life. Dario Robleto joined a glacier measuring expedition in Waterton Glacier International Peace Park and made sculptures about the disappearance of species and collective mourning. Diana Thater filmed wildlife in South Africa's iSimangaliso Wetland Park, and Xu Bing worked with schoolchildren near Mount Kenya's receding glaciers on artworks built from the Chinese characters for trees, with proceeds supporting reforestation.

A photograph from LaToya Ruby Frazier's series Flint is Family, which documents the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, a predominantly Black city whose residents were exposed to lead-contaminated water. It shows Moses West, a retired Army captain and engineer who builds atmospheric water generators that pull drinking water from the air, holding a “Free Water” sign on North Saginaw Street. Following Flint is Family, Frazier partnered with West and AWG Contracting to bring one of his generators to Flint so residents could make their own clean water. The work is an archival pigment print on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta, 40 × 30 in. It was shown in Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer Museum, UCLA (2024–25), as an example of what scholar Rob Nixon calls slow violence.

A large-scale architectural model of a floating settlement by Vietnamese American artist Tiffany Chung, herself a political and climate refugee. Built from Plexiglas, wood veneer, plastic, aluminum, paint, steel, cable, foam, and copper wire, and measuring nearly twenty by ten feet, the work imagines vernacular stilt houses and floating communities as a way to consider forced migration and displacement caused by climate change, including projections that parts of Vietnam will be consumed by rising seas by 2050. It was shown in Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer Museum, UCLA (2024–25).

A large-scale garden installation commissioned for the Hammer Museum exhibition Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice (2024–25), the largest work in the show. South Los Angeles environmental activist Ron Finley, known as the “Gangsta Gardener,” planted a terrace outside the museum's bookstore and galleries with fruit trees, vegetables, and herbs, some growing in salvaged bathtubs and sinks, and set out about two dozen chairs for visitors. A “Redline Realty” sign recalls the housing discrimination that shaped Los Angeles neighborhoods, and plant markers carry the names of people killed by police. The work extends Finley's practice of turning neglected urban ground into food gardens as an act of community care and self-determination. After the exhibition, its soil and materials were returned to the artist.

A major exhibition at the Hammer Museum, UCLA, that centered environmental art addressing the climate crisis and human-caused disasters, and their inescapable intersection with equity and social justice. Curated by artist Glenn Kaino and guest curator Mika Yoshitake, with PST fellow Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow, it brought together more than 100 works by 25 intergenerational artists working in photography, multimedia, augmented reality, painting, living organisms, and more, and filled most of the Hammer's galleries and outdoor spaces. Conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning of 2020, the exhibition drew on ancestral Indigenous knowledge that treats all elements of nature as one family rather than as resources for human use. New commissions included Cannupa Hanska Luger's multi-part installation Sovereign, a Garnett Puett Apisculpture made in collaboration with a living bee colony, Lan Tuazon's outdoor installation built from plastic waste donated by visitors, Ron Finley's garden installation Grounded, and Mel Chin's IOV (Interpretation of Vision), developed from stories gathered through an open call. Other works traced the slow violence of environmental harm, from LaToya Ruby Frazier's photographs of the Flint water crisis to Tiffany Chung's architectural models of climate displacement in Vietnam. Part of Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide and presented in partnership with Conservation International, the exhibition was also documented as a Getty case study in measuring and reducing an exhibition's carbon footprint. After its Los Angeles presentation, the exhibition traveled to the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston and to the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis (August 7 – November 29, 2025), where a version with fourteen of the artists hosted UC Davis classes in the galleries, including a course whose students created the performance Breath, Soil, Water, Life in response to LaToya Ruby Frazier's Flint is Family in Three Acts.

A major exhibition at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz, that brought internationally acclaimed artists into collaboration with marine ecologists at the Friedlaender Lab. Its title reflects how both weather and whales act as indicators of climate change. Presented across the institute's three galleries and screening room, the exhibition paired new research and data from two years of Friedlaender Lab fieldwork, much of it made public for the first time, with video installations, sculpture, photography, and other works, most of them newly commissioned. The research traces how environmental toxins, sea ice retreat, and other threats affect whales and other large marine mammals, including in Monterey Bay and along California's coast. Together, the science and the artworks explore human and nonhuman experiences of the climate crisis and imagine climate justice across land and ocean. The participating scientists were Natalia Botero Acosta, Ari Friedlaender, Chloe Lew, and Logan Pallin. Organized as part of An Aesthetics of Resilience and funded by a University of California Office of the President California Climate Action Seed Grant, with additional support from the Coha Nowark Art + Science Fund, the exhibition was accompanied by the public program series Intersections of Climate Change, study guides, and a catalog.

A university art and research center at UC Santa Cruz that uses exhibitions, research, and public programs to engage the critical issues of the present, bringing the arts together with the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Founded in 2014 to expand the visual arts at UC Santa Cruz, it opened the university's first professional, climate-controlled galleries on the Westside of Santa Cruz in 2023 under director and chief curator Rachel Nelson. Its Art + Science programs focus on climate resilience. Chief among them is An Aesthetics of Resilience, a research initiative with the Friedlaender Lab that brings scientists, artists, humanists, and activists together to examine vulnerability in the face of climate change, and that produced the exhibition and catalog Weather and the Whale (2025–26). Other programs include Visualizing Abolition, LASER Talks, the Coha Nowark Art + Science Pilot Residency, graduate student fellowships, and paid undergraduate internships.

A research center in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz that considers the intersection of culture and environment. Founded and directed by art historian T. J. Demos, it studies how artists, filmmakers, photojournalists, architects, writers, and activists critically address and creatively negotiate climate change, extraction, habitat destruction, and environmental injustice. Drawing on visual culture, political ecology, Earth jurisprudence, Indigenous cosmopolitics, and climate justice activism, the center supports the department's PhD program in Visual Culture and hosts symposia, exhibitions, a reading group, an online journal, and public conversations. Its programs include the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar Beyond the End of the World (2019–21), the exhibition Forest Law by Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares at the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery (2018), and the online seminar Nuclear Nows: Contemporary Art, Radiation, and Militarized Ecologies (2024).

An international, transdisciplinary collective of artists, scientists, designers, and scholars that invites the public to engage with algae, from the microscopic to the planetary scale. Launched in 2018, the lab approaches algae as companion species, vital to climate resilience and atmospheric balance, and works through artworks, workshops, writing, and exhibitions that cultivate multispecies kinship. Most of its founding members were UC Santa Cruz graduate students who worked with Jennifer Parker in the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center. More than 100 artists, scientists, and scholars on three continents have taken part, with core members at UC Santa Cruz, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Reed College, RMIT University, the University of the Sunshine Coast, and the University of Gothenburg. Exhibitions include CONFLUENCE: Experimentation | Installation | Collaboration at the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina (2022), with further projects at the MOXI Museum in Santa Barbara and the Madrid Planetarium.

A wallpaper pattern built from a sample of seaweeds and kelp gathered over 100 years and held in the Algae Collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Marine algae oxygenate the ocean, create habitat for other organisms, and anchor a vast marine food web; repeated across a wall, a century of collected specimens becomes an immersive record of coastal life and of the scientific care that preserved it. Digital print on archival paper, made in 2022 through The Algae Society Bio Art & Design Lab, with support from Anya Chytrowski, the UCSC Arts Research Institute, and the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center. The wallpaper was shown in CONFLUENCE: Experimentation | Installation | Collaboration at the Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina (January 28 – April 24, 2022) and Seymour Discovery Center at UC Santa Cruz (April – October 2026).

This gallery presents exhibitions that connect the UC Merced campus with artists, ideas and communities from across California and beyond. Located in El Portal, the gallery is free and open to students, campus visitors and the public.

Human history is brief when measured against the age of the Earth. At UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum, Tiffany Chung’s mid-career survey exhibition considers human history alongside the planet’s much longer timeline. “Tiffany Chung: indelible traces” brings together more than 70 artworks spanning 25 years by the Vietnamese American artist and UCSB alumna. Known for her detailed hand-drawn and embroidered maps, Chung depicts history as layered and interconnected. She combines statistical data, archival research and lived experience to build fuller accounts of historical events — and to represent what has been left out or remains unclear. Organized by the AD&A Museum and guest curated by Orianna Cacchione, deputy director at the University of Richmond Museums, the exhibition reflects a practice grounded in research. That research takes visual form through various mediums, in which mapping plays a key role.

Of considerable breadth for a museum of its size, the AD&A Museum’s Art Collections includes the Morgenroth Collection of Renaissance Medals and Plaquettes, the Sedgwick Collection of Old Master Paintings, the Feitelson Collection of Old Master Drawings, the Ken Trevey Collection of American Realist Prints, the Fernand Lungren Collection, the Women Beyond Borders collection, the Garcia-Correa Collection of Mexican Prints, and a growing collection of contemporary artwork in all media. Contemporary holdings focus on artists active in California, particularly in the Santa Barbara community. The AD&A Museum also features significant holdings in photography, including an extensive collection of vintage daguerreotypes, tintypes and ambrotypes from 1840-1880 as well as works by Muybridge, Weegee, William Wegman, Gary Winogrand, and Carrie Mae Weems. In addition, the art collection is strong in ethnographic objects. Exhibitions and programs at the museum recorded in the archive include Environmental Communications: Big Bang Beat L.A. (2025), Bonnie Ora Sherk: Life Frames since 1970 (2026), Jackie Amézquita: Gemidos de la Tierra (2026) and the Campus Lagoon Tour & Exhibition Tour (2026), organized with the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration.

Böschl was interested in the theme of “haus.” The small icon of a Benedictine monk, symbolizing concord, sits serenely inside a simplified house form. The monk faces east, “waiting and hoping for a new day.”

Blazina’s Menagerie is a playful installation of cast hydro-cal sculptures. It explores memory through the magical forest fairy tales of a child’s imagination while questioning the identity of kitsch, suburban lawn ornaments in an unfamiliar setting.

Six rock and welded steel sculptures and a cast metal stump by Mark Baugh-Sasaki, placed around a creek on the grounds of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California. The pieces fuse man-made geometric forms with found natural objects.

The UC Davis node of the UC Climate Action Arts Network supports creative research at the intersection of art, climate action, and community resilience. Its projects include CAAN You Hear It?, a podcast featuring designers and other creatives working on the front lines of climate action, with a focus on inclusive storytelling and diverse perspectives.

Inside a pink aluminum box (36 × 32 × 34 in.), roughly the size of a curled-up body, a woman moves. Born out of grief and loss, this sculpture, installation, and performance by San Francisco multimedia artist Alex Nichols, made with sound artists Kevin Corcoran and Jorge Bachmann, addresses the constraints that society, culture, race, and gender place on individuals.

Environmental communicators, people who can turn research into stories that move the public, are what this UC Merced major and minor set out to train. Coursework centers on literary, artistic, and creative works about the environment, and students make creative work of their own. The program gives particular attention to Indigenous ways of knowing and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Black ecology, BIPOC perspectives, and decolonizing frameworks.

UCLA faculty and students from across disciplines come together here to study how storytelling, communications, and media can support sustainability and environmental justice. The lab starts from the premise that environmental challenges are cultural and political as well as scientific. It supports research, teaching, and public engagement around the narratives communities use to understand environmental crisis and possibility.

Combining historical collections, contemporary art exhibitions, and public programs, the Hammer Museum at UCLA emphasizes artist-centered practices and engagement with pressing social and environmental issues. Free and open to the public, its collections span international contemporary art, works on paper, and sculpture, with a particular focus on Los Angeles artists. Exhibitions such as Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice (2024–25) explore connections between art, environmental change, and social justice while advancing sustainable exhibition practices. The museum also supports artistic research and collaboration through residencies that connect artists with UCLA faculty, students, collections, and the broader Los Angeles arts community.

The Conditional Studio at UCLA Arts investigates the physical infrastructure of digital technologies and their connections to environmental, economic, and social systems. Challenging the idea that computation exists primarily as abstract code or software, the studio examines the material resources, labor, and power structures that sustain technological systems. Through artistic research, exhibitions, workshops, and public dialogue, it makes visible the often-overlooked ecological and political consequences of digital technologies while fostering collaborative learning, critical inquiry, and commitments to social, technological, and climate justice.

How culture shapes our understanding of setting and climate is the central question for this UC Irvine research center. Through research, teaching, and community outreach, it examines the political histories, legacies of imperialism, economic ideologies, and technologies behind the climate crisis, with a commitment to environmental justice.

Organized by curator Theo Tegelaers of TAAK Amsterdam, this fieldwork program in Marfa, Texas, was a joint project of art schools including the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam; the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem; the Cooper Union School of Art, New York; and UCLA Design Media Arts, Los Angeles.

Artists, designers, scientists, and community partners collaborate in this research studio on place-based fieldwork and storytelling that address the ecological crisis and its links to environmental injustice. Founded by professor rebeca méndez, the studio is part of UCLA’s Design Media Arts department.

Media artists and bio- and nanoscientists work together through this center, based in UCLA’s Design Media Arts department and the California NanoSystems Institute. It hosts visiting scholars and artists-in-residence, public lectures and symposia, and the Sci|Art NanoLab Summer Institute for high school students. It is also home to the Art|Sci Collective, an international group making projects about the social, ethical, and environmental questions raised by scientific innovation.

Graduate students at UC Irvine lead this research group on art, decolonization, abolition, ecosocialism, and climate change. Founded in 2019 by Marianna Davison, Aaron Katzeman, and Scott Volz, it helped lay the groundwork for UCI’s Environmental Humanities Research Center. Its name nods to UCI scientists’ role in identifying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as the main cause of ozone depletion.

Founded in 2022 in UC Irvine’s School of Humanities, this center supports research on systemic inequality, focused on race, Indigeneity, and migration. It promotes collaborative methods in which faculty, students, staff, and community members work as co-researchers, and it seeks ways of sharing research that lead to social change.

Connecting California’s artistic history to the present, this public art museum uses its collection, exhibitions, and programs to bridge UC Irvine and Orange County.

Exhibitions, research, and public programs here explore where art, science, and engineering meet, with a focus on new forms of interdisciplinary art made with digital technologies. The center is part of UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts.

Scholars, students, artists, and community groups work together through this UC Davis program on media arts projects that strengthen communities and inform regional decisions. Its pilot project, Up from the Understory, worked with youth and adults in the Blue Mountain area of Calaveras County. Together they documented a Sierra Nevada foothill community’s history of boom-and-bust resource extraction and its efforts toward sustainable renewal. Later projects include Restore/Restory, Passion for the Land, and Youth Voices for Change.

Since opening in 2016, this free-admission museum at UC Davis has put contemporary art in direct conversation with university research. Its exhibitions and programs have featured artists working on identity, migration, environment, and material innovation.

Through art-based partnerships, this UC Davis Institute of the Environment program supports student research and learning on environmental issues and climate change. Its California Climate Art Trail is a series of murals made with students, youth groups, educators, farmers, and agricultural partners. The murals show how climate change affects agricultural communities and how those communities are responding.

Students learn science through hands-on art-making in this UC Davis program, working in ceramics, painting, textiles, photography, songwriting, and more. It grew out of Entomology 1: Art, Science and the World of Insects, a course launched in 2000 by entomologist Diane Ullman and ceramicist Donna Billick, who now co-direct the program. Housed in the Science and Society Program, it serves UC Davis students, K–12 students, and community members, often in partnership with the UC Davis Arboretum.

Offered by Diane Ullman in partnership with Donna Billick. This course explores the exciting world of insects with a focus on those biological components that make them an evolutionary success and a constant in human technology, culture, architecture, literature, film and religion. Students explore these topics in a richly layered learning environment in which they create and learn with a high degree of self-initiative and collaborative interaction. Interactive lectures (2 hours/week) convey concepts and factual information and students are asked to create art from this learning experience in studios (3 hours, 1 time/week) that focus on ceramics, textile surface design and graphic communication. Student projects frequently include large-scale public installations in the UC Davis Arboretum and campus buildings that are aimed at extending student learning to the public and creating accessibility to the academic enterprise and life-long learning opportunities.

Founded in 1970, UC Berkeley’s art museum and film archive holds more than 25,000 artworks and 18,000 films and videos, including the world’s largest collection of African American quilts. It presents exhibitions, screenings, talks, and performances at the edge of campus and downtown Berkeley.

Described as a think tank for the arts, this UC Berkeley center brings artists, scholars, curators, and civic arts leaders into dialogue across fields from visual art and dance to architecture and social practice. Its programs also examine the economic and institutional structures that support, or constrain, cross-disciplinary work.

Faculty, curators, staff, and students in the arts and humanities come together through this initiative to study the environment. Part of UC Berkeley’s Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, it focuses on critical histories, ethical futures, and the narrative, visual, media, and performance practices that advance environmental justice.

Cross-campus teams developing solutions for coastal climate resilience receive support from this UC Santa Cruz center. Project leads come from the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, and Physical & Biological Sciences. The center backs both projects ready to scale and pilots testing new ideas.

Exhibits, school field trips, youth programs, internships, and volunteer opportunities on Monterey Bay show visitors how ocean research informs the understanding and conservation of marine life. The center is the public face of UC Santa Cruz’s Long Marine Laboratory.