creative capital: an earth day update

I suppose we’re all impressed with Creative Capital. Their breadth and generosity are well known. What has become ever more apparent these past few years is their attention to environmental art and social impact. The recent newsletter (as of April 22, 2022, aka Earth Day), mentions the work of Sam Van Aken, a 2009 Creative Capital grantee:  The Open Orchard on Governor’s Island in New York. The public project “comprises 50 hybrid fruit trees which have been grafted with multiple varieties of fruits that originated or were historically grown in the New York City region over the past 400 years, but which have been lost to the industrialization of agriculture.”

Some of the artists working in art, climate, and sustainability they’ve supported recently include: Jordan Weber: 4MX Greenhouse, a land revitalization project on the site of Malcolm X’s Omaha home at birth; Jae Rhim Lee: Infinity Burial Suit, a technology which detoxifies the corpse using a new hybrid mushroom and creates clean compost; Alejandro Durán: Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape, an environmental installation and photography project that transforms the international debris washing up on Mexico’s Caribbean coast; and Etienne Charles: Earth Tones, a multimedia jazz performance featuring original compositions that document and feature peoples and regions that are, and will be, severely affected by climate change.

• The 2023/2024 grant theme was Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact. The deadline to apply has past. The opportunity to be challenged, to ponder what we could contribute to our own communities, remains in front of us.

• Some of the language they used that I liked: “experimental, risk-taking projects in wild, out-there, never-before-seen concepts and future universes real or imagined…groundbreaking…work that attends to the many relationships between social, economic, and environmental justice, and advances the global dialogue around critical issues impacting the sustainability of artists, our communities, our planet, and beyond.