Now available for advance purchase:
Looking for Tomorrow
Lessons from Art for the Time of Climate Change
JOSHUA SHANNON
How can looking at art help us solve the global crisis of climate change?
Looking for Tomorrow argues that spending time with art—looking slowly, with climate in mind—offers lessons indispensable to achieving a sustainable global civilization. Solving the climate crisis will require technical and political solutions, certainly. But it will also demand the remaking of some of our most basic beliefs. We cannot build a twenty-first-century society on unsustainable ideas inherited from industrial modernity.
Turning to modern art, Joshua Shannon shows how its creativity and innovation can ignite necessary transformations in our thinking. Across seven lessons, each grounded in deep engagement with a single artist, this book explores how art can help us unlearn the philosophies, myths, and fantasies that brought on our current crisis. It shows how art can now guide us toward new (and sometimes very old) ideas capable of supporting a sustainable and just civilization.
Art, Shannon argues, can be a guide toward connection, well-being, action, and balance. It can help us reconceive our world.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Imagining Sustainability 1. The Strangeness of Climate Change Grasping our contemporary condition, with sympathy and solidarity The art of Anastasia Samoylova and others 2. Beyond the Human Learning to stop placing people at the center of all our stories and ideas The art of Vincent van Gogh and others 3. Suffering, Justice, Joy Adopting strategies for resilience in difficult times The art of Jacob Lawrence and others 4. Forgetting Nature Relinquishing the myth that society is separate from nature The art of Stephen Shore and others 5. Deep Time Sensing our place in the long history of Earth The art of Nancy Holt and others 6. The Everyday Sublime Finding exaltation in ordinary places The art of Vija Celmins and others 7. Trees and Fungus, or Greater Consciousness Tuning in to the intelligence of other species The art of Wangechi Mutu and others Epilogue: Art, Love, and Citizenship Art for Sustainability: A Creative Response Project Acknowledgments Sources and Further Reading Index
| You Are Warmly Invited
To make your own artwork inspired by one or more of the seven chapters or “lessons” discussed in Looking for Tomorrow.
Upload images of your artwork and look at the submissions of others here.
| About the Author
Joshua Shannon has worked on art and climate change with universities and museums around the world. He is a Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. You can learn more about him and his work here.