talk about me and just ask questions about the ice sheet.
But all right, I'll begin.
I think I'll go a little bit more over here.
So let's see.
OK, there's the poster.
I've been brought here, I think, because I'm the artist.
And I'm also someone who's very interested in climate change.
This is the cover to a recent exhibition I had in Philadelphia
called Politics of Snow.
Called Politics of Snow.
And there's a similar exhibition called Politics of Snow 2
that's at the Bernstein Gallery in Princeton, Woodrow Wilson
School, right now.
So how did I get into this?
Well, first I'm just going to give you a little example
of some of the installation of that recent show.
And then I'm going to go a little bit back in time,
because I've been a landscape painter for 40 some odd years.
So I didn't always think about climate change.
This is an installation of a show that
was at Tufts University.
And it then traveled to The Mitchner.
The show was about volcanoes and Iceland.
So yes, I do love geology.
And I did a big volcano study that
lasted from about 2000 to 2003.
And then I went off to Iceland for more volcanoes.
But then I got into waterfalls, because you
know that happens with volcanoes and melting glaciers.
So this was that exhibition.
And in that exhibition, is it in focus?
Because it really doesn't look in focus for me.
Is it in focus?
Whatever.
We'll just have to go with it.
When the show moved from Tufts to The Mitchner Museum,
they wanted more work.
And the people knew that I had actually
worked on snow and ice way back in the 70s.
And so they found this painting, and this
was part of the exhibition.
And this painting was done in 1976.
This exhibition took place in 2006.
So it made me think back.
I went back in time and went back to those images
that I was doing when I was quite young in the 70s.
And this was one of the first projects I worked on.
And I worked on it because I love the expanse of snow.
I love the outdoors because I'm from Brooklyn.
And I just kept doing this stuff.
So this is where it began.
I started thinking about this beginning
as I was talking to all these people at The Mitchner
30 years later.
I had a show of this work in Arizona.
And the reason I agreed to do it at ASU
is because I knew the Grand Canyon was there.
And I wanted to see it.
So I said, OK, we'll do the show.
You take me to the Grand Canyon.
And they did.
And very serendipitously, I became
friendly with a man named Jim Turrell, who's a pilot,
a MacArthur fellow, and world renowned.
And he took me up in his plane.
So I saw the Grand Canyon from the air.
I saw Glen Canyon damp.
Now we could all say that's not nice about Lake Powell.
But to an artist, it really looked cool.
And I took lots of photographs.
And that's what began my career of flying
and taking photographs of the landscape
and then making images from those photographs.
And I've done this in many parts of the world.
The earlier one, I can go back.
OK, that was a whole project on the waterways of Pennsylvania.
And then I was in France.
And then I was in Giverny.
So what I'm doing now is I'm giving you
a quick summation of the kind of work
I did leading up to this climate change.
Pelageau, maybe some of you people
have been there for fellowships.
I had a residency there.
Again, it was sort of like this.
One artist and many scholars.
So it was fun, and I like being the artist.
So those were some of the studies
that were done while I was there.
Another big project I did when I got back from that in the 90s
was a public art project at the Marriott Hotel.
And it was all about the Whistahicken.
And I did it for about three years.
After that project, I really was sick of green.
And I had a friend who was going to Costa Rica to visit her son.
And I said, I need a change of scenery.
Of course, the first thing he did
is he took me to a rainforest.
He thought I'd be happy, but I was miserable,
because it was more green.
I love the monkeys, but it was just too green.
But I saw Arunal.
And I never had seen a volcano in my life.
So we're hanging out, Andrew and me, looking at Arunal.
And I said, this is amazing.
This is a volcano.
It goes, well, you know, we have other volcanoes in Costa Rica.
Maybe I could, we're in San Jose.
And sure enough, that's what happened.
I went to see the other volcanoes in Arunal.
And that got me started on my whole project of volcanoes,
working with scientists, volcanologists, who I would
connect with through the internet.
I love the internet.
It's a wonderful way to communicate quickly,
especially in pictures.
Hello, I'm an artist.
Can you help me?
This is what I do.
And they always say yes.
So I really, that was Alaska.
So I did this whole project.
I did get a grab, which helped me out.
And I was able to go to Alaska.
This is Hawaii.
And I would fly.
I always would connect with the observatory.
So I'd always get the right pilot.
So this is the pilot that works with the volcano observatory
on Big Island.
And we flew over the island.
I took lots of pictures, photos, made paintings.
So this is what I kept doing.
Here we are in Italy.
This is flying over the Mayolian Islands.
There's a painting that came from that project, Iceland.
I loved Iceland.
So you have on the right a photograph from Iceland.
On the left, the kind of painting
that would come from that photograph.
And of course, as I said, I went there
because it's the most volcanic country in the world.
But I just fell in love with all these waterfalls.
I mean, there are fossils everywhere.
I mean, that's what I wound up painting more than the glaciers,
although I did climb on many glaciers.
Well, going back to this show at Michener.
There I am.
I'm showing them volcanoes.
We're doing all this stuff.
And I'm thinking about that painting in the corner.
I'm thinking about how I made that painting then.
And I had this epiphany, 30 years.
Boy, have I changed my personal life, the world, the mountain.
And it just hit me.
You know, like, what is going on with those mountains now?
So I went back to the actual books
that I was using at the time.
This was one of them.
I found it.
And first thing I did is I made this series of paintings
about one iconic mountain, the Matterhorn.
Actually, do you know there's one in Disneyland
someone told me of Disney World?
I didn't know that, but someone told me.
But anyway, I figured this was a good way to start.
Maybe people would get the idea.
And I had a friend who said, when she came to my studio,
I only had three, she said, how can you paint something like this?
You're making beautiful paintings.
It's too political.
And I said, I know.
And she said, no, that's not good enough.
And actually, I thought she was right.
So after she chided me, I started reading more,
going back to my bookshelves.
And I had read Elizabeth Colbert years ago.
But I went back and I read some more.
And then, of course, I collected lots of books.
And I've done a lot of reading.
I don't know how long you could look at this
or how much in focus it is.
But I'm sure you, people out there, are familiar.
Can you see all these books?
So I started reading.
And I started going on the internet.
And by going on app, I started writing to scientists.
So I actually did that snap thing when
you can get some of your pages.
So you could see some of the places
I would go to, Arctic, Antarctic, Alpine Research.
I don't know if you did, but I don't know how I found him.
But he's a wonderful mountaineer in France.
We become friends.
He sent me pictures.
I became friendly with Bruce Monia, Ted Pfeffer.
These are people that you probably know of.
They've all given me images.
Henry Brecker became a really close friend.
He's to visit my show.
He comes to visit all the time.
He works with Lonnie Thompson at Ohio State University.
And he provided images.
OK, Bruce Monia, this major book on Alaska.
He provided images.
And I learned about repeat photography.
I never heard the word before.
You must know what it means, right?
Well, this was like a mind-boggling event for me,
because I could see the beginning and the end.
And what happened is, instead of doing what I used to do,
which was always going to a site, doing the field work,
making the pictures, taking the photographs, going back,
I was actually using other people's research.
Because I was able to get that.
And I certainly couldn't go back in time.
This is an example of Corey Callis Glacier and Peru.
Henry had been there for 40 years.
They would go back every year, and they would photograph.
So I had all of these images.
And I would figure out which ones I wanted to do naturally.
I'm the artist.
I could pick what I want.
So I would take the ones that had the most change
so that people could see them.
And then I would make paintings out of them.
And I would title the paintings with the date
and also with the acknowledgment whoever they were from.
So it would be Corey Callis Glacier,
1983 after Henry Brecker, 2009 after Henry Brecker,
or whoever I was getting them.
So I just have lots of these.
Here's some examples.
OK, USGS, I love them.
This is one place I like my tax dollars to go.
So I'm using all of their images.
And these are examples of different pieces.
These paintings are about, one of these small squares
are about two feet by two feet.
The larger ones are certainly larger.
But I hope you realize you all know who Grafford Washburn is.
I mean, he is a major explorer photographer
of an earlier time.
And there was a guy I met through a museum curator in Boston,
told me about David Arnold.
Should you know he's doing this series based on him?
Oh, OK, I'll get in touch with David.
And he allowed me to use his photographs
so that I can make paintings based on these comparisons.
I met a man named David Brashears.
You might know who he is.
He's a great Everest explorer into thin air, et cetera.
We became friendly, and he finally
gave me some of his images.
This is an example of a piece I did thanks to David.
What you have here is Mallory, David Brashears.
And then David said, can you do something of the future?
So you have Berko future.
So that actually is in the show at Princeton.
These are all paintings that have come from David's,
these last series, from images he's given me.
He's doing a whole project of going back into the Everest,
on both sides, Nepal and Tibet, and doing his repeat photography
project to save the glaciers in the Himalayas.
So those are from him.
This is an example of a slide that I got from a scientist
that you guys might know named Marco Tedesco.
I participated.
Someone here was there with me at the CUNY colloquium.
Marco showed this slide.
He also came up to me after and told me,
I think his wife's an art historian, so he liked art.
And hopefully he's going to write me into a grant.
And anyone out there can write me into a grant
so I can go and see some more and take pictures.
I'd be very happy to talk to you.
So we talked.
And this slide I thought was really wonderful,
because he used it as a beginning
to talk about how everything really comes together.
It's not about silos.
It's about all the different sciences coming together,
and everything is overlapping.
So I wrote to myself, can I use that?
And so I found out where to get it.
And I just think it's a good slide for everyone
to think about, because I think that's
the way the world should be.
I've also been following James Hanson's work,
reading about him through Elizabeth Colbert
and through his books as well.
And I love all these charts.
I love the chart that Osa was showing earlier.
But the question is, what does an artist do with these charts?
And I've been struggling with trying
to figure out what else I can do,
aside from just making diptychs.
There was a major show at the Feldman Gallery of Newton,
Helen Harrison, who are people in their 70s who
have been working in ecology and art for many, many years.
The leaders of the echo art movement
went to see their show, met them, knew them already.
This is the kind of work they do.
Their work is really generated based on ideas.
They try to solve ecological problems.
And I think the art comes after.
Well, I am more interested in making the art
and seeing how it can overlap with it.
So I keep trying to find different formats.
This is, these images are all from a book
that I found from the 70s that I had on the 1963 expedition,
the American expedition to Everest.
So that was a way of putting them together.
When Henry came to visit me, he was talking about Kilimanjaro.
And he said, oh, you know, we've done some stuff.
Henry, give me the images.
So Henry sent me the images.
So I did this work, the four for Henry.
But the other two were just from a NASA site on the internet.
So I also had these maps that were intriguing me.
One was from a book by Taff F. Effer
on the Columbia Glacier.
And of course, there's Austin Post,
who's one of the real heroes of this kind of study.
And I was trying to figure out a way to make that into art.
So what I've shown here is basically process.
It gives you a sense of what an artist does.
First, what I did is I taped the white out.
And I tried to make it into a painting where the paint,
even though you don't see the white, it's there.
I painted over it.
And I was trying to struggle with,
how can I get this idea across?
First, I put dates on the sides.
Then, I don't know if I have a slide if I put dates in the middle.
And then I finally came up with a solution.
And the solution was to actually take the text that
came out of the Alaska book.
Because that sort of set it.
And yet, it got rid of the numbers,
which was too graphic for me, because in the end,
it has to be a painting.
And I put that together with two other paintings that
were about Columbia Glacier, Bradford Washburn,
and the other Dave Arnold.
So it became a triptych.
And those are also in Princeton.
This was another map that intrigued me,
another glacial recessional map.
And I figured the way to do this was actually
to break it up into three paintings.
Each of these are 36 by 76.
And I did them in particularly knowing
I was having the Princeton show at a place that's about policy.
So clearly, my work is trying to integrate that more,
but find a way of doing it that still comes out
of my own practice.
Well, I found out from the curator that maybe they
were too tall for the space.
I was very upset.
But that gives me the chance to make another painting
and maybe solve it.
So I decided to solve it in a way by getting actually photographed.
I photographed the painting.
I had to repeat it five times through a photo process,
because I do photographs as well.
And then I painted the blue on top of it.
And so you see that there was another way of telling the story.
And there we are at Princeton actually hanging this piece
on canvas, that fit.
But the other one did as well.
Grinnell Glacier has been a real love of mine.
And I've done a number of paintings of Grinnell Glacier.
And finally this summer, I went to Grinnell Glacier.
And that was really a treat.
I actually got there.
I did it two ways.
I flew over in a helicopter, took photographs,
but also got there by hiking eight miles.
So I'm very proud of that.
And these are just some examples of photographs that I have.
And I think that really brings you right up to the present,
because these photos will be in a show at the Locke's Gallery
in the summer.
And I just end with this note from Lonnie Thompson,
because I wrote back to all my science friends,
thanking them for all their help.
And he wrote back.
And what he says is, I do think that artists
have important role in climate science.
Often they can reach people at a different level.
And all great movements need artists and poets.
Isn't that nice?
OK.
The end.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
So we move the background, and perhaps turn the lights up
a little bit.
Yeah, get that cam, please.
Right?
Oh, I have to do it?
Well, I don't know where it's going to go.
It's going to go back.
Okay, we'll figure that out.
