Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Katherine Bernhardt Collaborate with Museums in Call for Climate Action
Alongside twelve other artists, Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Katherine Bernhardt have partnered with institutions participating in the public arts initiative for climate awareness, A Cool Million. Led by Art to Acres and For Freedoms with support from Art + Climate Action, the initiative aims to expand environmental justice programming, education, and support the conservation of one million acres of land central to the California hydrological system. Collaborating with artists and art institutions across California, climate-related artworks have been installed on billboards, museum facades, and museum-based signage within the state and online to coincide with Earth Day 2022, on April 22.
Akunyili Crosby’s participation includes a partnership with the Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD). They are producing a large print-mural that will be featured on the windows of the museum's facade. Akunyili Crosby’s work features dense foliage of endemic plants from Eastern Nigeria, with photographic imagery that embodies the leaves, including an advertisement for African wax-cloth fabric and a personal photograph of the artist and her sister visiting their ancestral village. The layered composition evokes ecosystems of movement of diaspora across the globe.
Installation view, Katherine Bernhardt’s wheatpaste posters, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022. Photo by Da'Shaunae Marisa
Bernhardt has partnered with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to produce a wheatpaste poster mural on the four hundred feet construction site on Wilshire Boulevard. The artist will also donate an in-progress 96” x 120” painting, which will be sold through the gallery. One hundred percent of the proceeds will be matched at least two hundred percent to preserve indigenous land in South Suriname.
As California suffers from warming temperatures and the worst wildfires since state record-keeping, this partnership between artists and institutions aims to support land conservation relevant to California’s hydrological cycle. Learn more at A Cool Million.
Cover image: Installation view, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Dwellers: Native One, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, 2022. Photo by Tinashe Chidarikire
Panelist Event
TIME named Wolfgang Tillmans to the 2023 TIME100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris was invited to write about the artist, stating “[...] Tillmans has the unique ability to take his viewer through histories and timelines both real and imagined, as seen in his recent traveling retrospective, To Look Without Fear.
Read a new poem from the artist, on the occasion of her solo exhibition in New York, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers.