Weather Report by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

W E AT H E R R E P O R T

EXTENDED FORECAST

5 percent carbon dioxide. The oxygen we breathe courses through our blood, and the carbon dioxide we exhale is absorbed by plant life and partially converted back to oxygen, with the majority falling back to the forest floor to become carbon-rich soil that grows our food. Yet weather is considered to be something external to us: above our heads, outside our windows, raining on our parades.

How does one begin to consider the earth’s atmosphere? Impossibly vast—its volume at sea level is 2.7 billion cubic miles—but at the same time, inconceivably thin—three-quarters of its mass is within twelve miles of our planet’s surface. Common conceptions about the atmosphere grossly simplify its nature. For instance, where does the atmosphere really begin and end? Water, and the earth’s oceans, are inexorably part of the atmosphere, with the oceans containing 870 million cubic miles of water, and while it’s difficult to know definitively, the earth’s mantle is estimated to contain as much as five times the amount of water as there is on the surface of the earth. We think of the sky as being made of gas, the oceans of water, and the planet rock, but about 1 percent of the atmosphere at sea level is water vapor, 93 percent of the planet’s carbon dioxide is sequestered in algae, vegetation, and coral in the world’s oceans, and a majority of the earth’s helium is underground in natural gas deposits—the same deposits that contain methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gasses.1

But weather doesn’t only affect us physically. Our immersion in the atmosphere and its various moods has a profound impact on our imagination. If Shelley’s famous claim that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” holds any truth, perhaps we can also consider that visual artists are the unacknowledged weather forecasters of our planet. If you don’t believe this, evidence is provided by a recent study published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics that posits that the colors of sunsets painted by artists in the past, including J. M. W. Turner, can be used to estimate air pollution levels.2 For instance, in 1815 the Tambora volcano exploded in Indonesia, creating the largest dust and ash cloud in historical memory, resulting in unusually bright red and orange sunsets in Europe for several years after the eruption. Turner accurately recorded this phenomenon, which until recently was thought to be the artist’s

There’s an old joke where one fish asks another, “How’s the water?” The other fish replies, “What the hell is water?” We are much like the second fish, living in and being sustained by something that we are generally oblivious of. We only seem to pay attention to the atmosphere when the rain stops falling and our crops wither, or when convection over the warm waters of the ocean spurs the formation of what the Tíano, the indigenous people of the Caribbean, referred to as “god of the storm,” a hurakań. We don’t just live in the atmosphere, it is part of us and we are part of it. If you are the average person, while reading the above paragraph you breathed approximately four liters of air. The air you inhaled was composed of approximately 21 percent oxygen and 0.04 percent carbon dioxide, while the air you exhaled was about 15 percent oxygen and

J. M. W. Turner Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844 Collection of The National Gallery, London

exaggeration of normal sunset coloration. The year 1816 is referred to as “the year without a summer,” owing to the reflection of so much solar radiation back into space as a result of Tambora’s globecovering dust cloud. Similarly, paintings such as Turner’s famous Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway (p. 2), picture the miasma of coal smoke and particulate matter released by the industrial revolution’s initial burst of burning fossil fuels. Looked at with the eye of a meteorologist, Rain, Steam, and Speed is a harbinger of climate change, providing evidence before the advent of instrumental atmospheric measurement.

the World’s Weather (p. 4–5) is a drawing rendered from a global photomosaic of 450 individual images from the Tiros IX weather satellite taken during twenty-four hours on February 13, 1965. Suddenly, an artist with a sheet of paper could look far beyond the horizon and render the complex currents and eddies in what Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution, called the planet’s “great aerial ocean.” The earth, once thought to be limitless, was suddenly smaller and more fragile than we thought. Also in the 1970s radar networks began to be interlinked; the number of scanned angles was increased, allowing for the first time threedimensional views of phenomenon such as thunderstorms. In the following decades sophisticated Doppler radar augmented by computers became widespread, advancing our understanding of weather systems. In the early 2000s Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, whose work focuses on the forces and structures that shape both society and the natural world, began a series that visualized information from metrological science. Taking three-dimensional data on the development of supercell thunderstorms provided by the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois, Manglano-Ovalle rendered ephemeral storm clouds as seemingly solid threedimensional objects. Commenting on these sculptures, the artist has stated: “In the end, it’s an impossibility. You really haven’t captured ephemera; you’ve made a thing—a sculpture. You’ve negated the notion of ephemera. Then it’s only the public moving around the piece, experiencing it, that it becomes the ephemeral moment.”3 ManglanoOvalle’s Storm Prototype (p. 6–7) fulfills his belief in recreating the ephemeral through sleight of hand: shrinking two images of the development of a supercell cloud taken sixty seconds apart into two astounding reflective objects that manage to bring the fleeting majesty of the sky down to earth.

No matter how much painters—including Turner and his fellow Englishman John Constable— engaged with the sky, their works are always classified as landscape, clearly illustrating the blind spot we have toward the atmosphere. Perhaps this is due to the ephemeral nature of the weather and our inability to have any control over it. (The land can be owned and subjugated to human need, but not the sky.) This view of nature, however, began to change with the birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and ’70s. It was during this period that pollution—both air and water—began to be seriously addressed, but it was also during this time that our understanding of the weather expanded due to the advent of both satellite imagery and computer modeling of atmospheric phenomenon. Those decades also marked a period when artists were turning to more conceptual approaches that in many cases mirrored the techniques of scientific inquiry. In the early 1970s Nancy Graves began to make drawings and paintings of the weather based on satellite photos. No longer did an artist need to go outdoors and look up to make work depicting the atmosphere. Technology had expanded our perception, allowing an understanding that was truly global in reach. This was the era of the Apollo moon program, Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue, and the Gaia Hypothesis, a time when society was waking up to the interrelatedness of the environment and life on earth. Graves’s First Look at

Indeed, one of the challenges of making art about the weather is how to communicate the spectacular and transitory within the limitations of visual art.

Nancy Graves First Look at the World’s Weather, 1973 Courtesy of the Nancy Graves Foundation and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York Photo: © Nancy Graves Foundation / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY 5.

IĂąigo Manglano-Ovalle Storm Prototype, 2007 Courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

Clouds, by their very nature, define the ephemeral, and artists have struggled with their representation for centuries. Before he made art Kim Keever worked as a NASA researcher studying the high-speed behavior of air through jet engines and past moving bodies such as missiles. Turning his back on science, he moved to New York City in 1980 to pursue a career in art, first making paintings that relate to geological processes. In the ensuing years Keever returned to his early interest in fluid dynamics by evolving a practice that combined painting and photography in equal measure. Keever creates “clouds” in a large water-filled aquarium by pouring pigments of different viscosities into its confines and

then capturing frozen moments of the process in large-format photographs. This technique, which is analogous to convection in the atmosphere, results in astounding, often otherworldly images (p. 8) resembling what planetary science hypothesizes for the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. Keever’s approach to simulating atmospheric processes echoes the “dishpan” experiments begun in the 1950s, where scientists attempted to understand world weather dynamics by studying the eddies formed in shallow pans of water mounted on rotating tables. Among these researchers was MIT mathematician Edward Lorenz, who in the 1970s coined the phrase “chaos theory.”

Kim Keever Abstract 21871, 2016 Courtesy of the artist and Jerald Melberg Gallery, NC

Besides weather, the other major ephemeral aspect of the atmosphere is sound. Organized sound—music—shares with weather an ability to influence our moods and emotional life. Musicians have turned to weather repeatedly as both subject and metaphor, from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons to Dylan’s famous line “It doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” As we have seen, science as well as art has increasingly turned to data as a source for the creation of new paradigms, a trend not limited to visual art. For musician and visual artist Sara Bouchard, the weather data for New York City was utilized to create twelve “songs,” each representing a month of weather statistics recorded by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at its monitoring station in Central Park. The data was composed into scores and transferred onto scroll-like punch cards that one can play in a hand-cranked music box. Bouchard inserted her aesthetics into the data in various ways, such as deciding which data points are sounded and which are silent, and by representing wind-gust speeds and precipitation amounts by changes in octaves. Bouchard’s Weather Box (p. 10) is in the lineage of conceptual approaches to music making through the ordering of random information, a technique that runs from John Cage to Brian Eno.

hues reminiscent of the sky, hover over the floor like cloud decks seen from above. Included in this exhibition is a carpet by Bloom (p. 11) that borrows part of a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s novel All The Pretty Horses (1992): “Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were underway at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”4 Bloom’s use of braille to visually describe weather emphasizes both her interest in the depiction of absence and the expression of melancholy. The weather being recounted cannot be seen by a blind person, and a sighted person cannot read the braille. The collision of opposites, including warm and cool air, often leads to tragedy, and in an era when extreme weather seems to be more prevalent, artists have used this polarity to speak not just of weather itself, but also of weather as the poetic equivalent of human catastrophe. In 2018 Nick Cave created a series of circular wall works titled Tondos (p. 12). Cave overlapped Doppler radar images of cataclysmic weather patterns with brain scans of black youth suffering from PTSD as a result of gun violence, rendering this information in the medium of glass beads and sequined fabric. The artist presents inner-city gun violence and police shootings as a storm, seemingly as out of control as the moving eye of a hurricane. “You know, we could be having a lovely day,” the artist has stated, “but then in a second there could be a mass shooting. How does that shift our existence, our internal beliefs. . . . I mean, it’s all these things layering and interfacing at the same time, and yet I’ve got to somehow still remain grounded in the midst of complexity. And I think that’s how I chose to build the work.”5 Cave’s Tondos, as beautiful as they are ominous, offer solace in the face of extremes.

Literature has consistently used weather as either a protagonist or a backdrop in storytelling. Examples include L. Frank Baum’s children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and Rick Moody’s novel The Ice Storm (1994), both subsequently turned into films. Since weather can conjure a range of emotions, it is can be a convenient character or plot device to emphasize aspects of narrative, from joy to abject fear. Artist Barbara Bloom has been consistently drawn to literature as subject matter, and it is most evident in The Weather, a body of work created in 2015 in which Bloom made a series of hand-tufted wool carpets that had written on them fragments of texts translated into braille. The texts were descriptions of weather taken from stories by Raymond Chandler, James Joyce, Haruki Murakami, and Daphne du Maurier, among others. The carpets, all rendered in wool of different

Weather can be used as a potent metaphor for turmoil and change—both on a societal and a personal level—but in numerous instances its connection with human affairs goes beyond the merely symbolic to actually influence the course of history and politics. For artists Mats Bigert and Lars

Sara Bouchard Weather Box, 2014 Courtesy of the artist

10.

Barbara Bloom Some flawed place in the iron dark of the world. (McCarthy), 2015 Courtesy of the artist and David Lewis Gallery, New York

11.

Nick Cave Tondo, 2018 Private collection Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

12.

Bergström, humanity’s relationship with nature is a primary subject, and increasingly their practice has led to work that reflects on meteorology. In 2017 the duo created a body of work titled Inside the Weather—A Synoptic Battlefield, which took the form of an installation of sculptural works composed out of the graphic symbols used on weather maps. Our modern usage of the term “front” to describe the advancing edge of high- and low-pressure areas originated during World War I as an analogy to the forward edge of a battlefield, and indeed it is at a weather front where many of the most dramatic atmospheric phenomena occur. Included in this exhibition is Bigert & Bergström’s work The Russian Campaign 1812 (p. 16–17): two freestanding, serrated steel forms that are the map symbols for cold fronts. At the base of each form is a small pile of radiating shapes—the meteorological shorthand for snow. The work was inspired by the final failure of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in November 1812, due to the onset of the severe Russian winter. The development of meteorology was advanced by the military’s need for accurate weather forecasting: the army with the best forecasting had a huge advantage on the battlefield. Even today, if one charts the rise and fall of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, a clear correlation exists between a decrease in insurgency and military response and the advent of brutal heat in the Middle Eastern summer.

a performative sculptural work that reflected on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. A glass goblet in three pieces—foot, stem, and cup—is threaded with monofilament fishing line at the bottom of a water-filled glass tank. The fishing line runs up and out of the tank to an 1,800-footlong spool tethered to two helium-filled weather balloons. For the performance, Salstrom releases the balloons, and when they have reached 1,800 feet—the height of the atomic bomb’s detonation over Hiroshima—the tension on the line pulls the three parts of the goblet together, forming a whole goblet and raising it to the top of the tank. At some point the balloons either pop or lose their helium, and the parts once again sink and disassemble. The heat of the Hiroshima blast fused glass, and the mushroom cloud and resulting firestorm formed what came to be known as a pyrocumulonimbus cloud: a man-made storm with its own internal weather. The public outcry against aboveground nuclear testing led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty between the US, the Soviet Union, and the UK in 1973 (China continued atmospheric testing until

In 1975 geophysicist Wallace Broecker published “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”6 Although the term had been used previously, Broecker’s paper and the attention it received helped push the reality of global warming into the mainstream. But the idea of human affairs radically altering the earth’s environment was first popularized by the threat of nuclear war in the 1950s. At the height of tensions between the US and the Soviet Union in 1983, the term “nuclear winter” was coined to describe the long-term effects of the massive amounts of particulate matter that would be released into the atmosphere during a global nuclear conflict. In 2011, while glassblower Sean Salstrom was living in Japan, he created Indefinity Box (p. 14),

Atomic bomb mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1945 Courtesy National Archives, photo no. 342-AF-58189

13.

Sean Salstrom Indefinity Box, 2011/2019 Documentation of performance, Toyama City, Toyama Prefecture, Japan, 2011 Courtesy of the artist 14.

Violet Dennison Mirror Stage, 2018 Courtesy of the artist and Jan Kaps, Cologne

15.

Bigert & Bergstrรถm The Russian Campaign 1812, 2017 Courtesy of the artists and Belenius Gallery, Stockholm Photo: Yan Haibo

16.

1974, France until 1980). Thankfully, mushroom clouds have disappeared from our skies, but frighteningly their specter still remains. It can be argued that we live in an age defined by threats. For Violet Dennison an uneasy sense of distress has informed a body of work that incorporates environmental as well as related health concerns. The artist has made a series of works utilizing institutional water fountains to reflect on the supposed safety and isolation of institutional space, as well as on the reality that nowadays even water can’t be trusted. For Mirror Stage (p. 15), Dennison deconstructed two identical water fountains, revealing their internal components as well as the bar codes, stamps, and inspection seals that point to the global economics of the fountain’s manufacture. The artist has laid bare the usually hidden refrigeration equipment that cools the fountain’s water: mechanical refrigeration enables us to create microclimates, a situation that has allowed humankind to build cities in otherwise uninhabitable places. A high-rise city like New York would be unthinkable in the summer without refrigeration and air conditioning, and its power needs in the summer are primarily based on the immense quantity of electricity it takes to cool the built environment. Tragically, the energy required to cool our infrastructure is the source of global warming, creating a dystopian feedback loop in which we need to cool ourselves more while we heat up the planet. The information printed on Mirror Stage’s compressor does reveal one bright spot: contemporary refrigeration equipment has eliminated the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), as they were banned worldwide in 1989 due to their erosion of the earth’s ozone layer.7 Arguably, there is no artist whose work is more dependent on the weather than Andy Goldsworthy. His temporal environmental works, recorded via photography, are composed outdoors of natural materials and often only last a few minutes. The artist’s usual haunts are the rural and bucolic, but in the winter of 2010 Goldsworthy found himself in New York City, hardly a place where his typical

17.

Andy Goldsworthy Gutter Water â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Night, Times Square, New York, March 6, 2010, 2010 Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong & Co., New York

18.

materials are readily abundant. Walking the city in early March, he was drawn to what New Yorkers studiously avoid: the stagnant puddles of slush that regularly fill gutters in the winter. Utilizing a bucket, Goldsworthy gathered the watery slush and threw it on the sidewalk to form puddles, recording with his camera the way the city’s architecture influenced the reflection of ambient light on the puddle’s surfaces. For Gutter Water – Night, Times Square, New York, March 6, 2010 (p. 18), Goldsworthy poured his bucket on a sidewalk in the artificially illuminated canyon of Times Square and took a series of photographs that documented the puddle’s reflections of the massive LED screens above as well as pedestrian traffic on the surrounding pavement. Does this work in any manner reference the weather? Obviously, the slush speaks of late winter in the city, but the light of Times Square’s signage is also—and perhaps more profoundly—produced by the burning of carbon sequestered by forests and sea life in the earth’s deep past. Today’s coal and natural gas deposits were made from carbon dioxide absorbed by vegetation around 300 million years ago through the process of photosynthesis, and the light of Times Square’s screens is created with what remains of this past atmosphere.

has the ability to cool both the mind and the body, and Chicago Snow reveals our hardwired responses to visual cues provided by the atmosphere. The sky is a backdrop against which our lives are played out, with each day made distinct by its weather, and at least for those living in temperate regions, the year is defined by the changing seasons. For Byron Kim the sky has become the focus of a unique, ongoing autobiographical project separate from, but related to, his usual practice. Every Sunday since January 7, 2001, Kim has paused to do a quick, observational painting of the sky on a 14 x 14-inch canvas. With a pen or pencil he then writes a short journalistic entry on top of the image he has painted, adding a line at the bottom that notes date, time, and place. Much of Kim’s work deals with the nature of color, and the color of the sky has long been the subject of aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific debate. By juxtaposing the sky against a diary of sorts, Kim sets up a conversation between the eternal and the mundane, between the objective and the subjective, and between the eye and the mind. “My work has mostly been concerned with the relationship of a part to the whole,” Kim has stated. “How am I connected to the others in the world, and how are we all connected to the greater whole?”8 Kim understands that the content of the text he quickly writes on these paintings is as transitory as the weather conditions he’s depicting. The thoughts and feelings written on the Sunday Paintings (p. 21) intimately connect the artist to those around him, while the act of capturing the sky links him to the eternal present.

When we think of global warming, one of the dramatic phenomenon that comes to mind is the melting of polar ice, but as the ice caps recede, the corollary is the quieter procession of equatorial weather northward. Artist Josh Callaghan’s nostalgia for the winters of his childhood in Chicago spurred the creation of a series of sculptures titled Chicago Snow (p. 20). Anyone who has spent time in urban areas that experience winter holds the memory of the abject, ubiquitous pile of dirty, partially melted snow, and Callaghan’s hyperrealistic snow sculptures capture an occurence that is a product equally of society and nature. Although the impetus for the creation of these works was autobiographical, Callaghan realized as he made them that they possessed an odd psychosomatic quality: viewers encountering the sculptures often felt a subtle temperature change. Just the suggestion of winter apparently

All life on earth participates in an exchange between itself and the environment. Our breath is a rhythm that is not acknowledged as often as our heartbeat yet is more fundamental to our existence. When we exhale, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and oxygen are released, but also water vapor, which as it turns out is a potent greenhouse gas. Water plays a huge role in the dynamics of the atmosphere, not only trapping heat, but also reflecting solar radiation back into space through the planet’s cloud cover.

19.

Josh Callaghan Chicago Snow 6, 2013 Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles

20.

Byron Kim Sunday Painting 4/21/19, 2019 Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

21.

Ayumi Ishii The Breath from Which the Clouds are Formed, 2015 Courtesy of the artist

22.

23.

Damian Loeb The Big Dipper, 2016 Courtesy of the artist and Acquavella Galleries

24.

Although it’s often difficult to understand, clouds are not objects, but rather areas in the atmosphere where the temperature differential causes water vapor to condense into water droplets. Temperature differential is what fuels most of what we consider weather, and anyone who has sky gazed on a hot summer day has witnessed small puffy clouds grow into menacing thunderheads as the land below is warmed and convection brings water vapor further upward, where it condenses due to colder air layers. Ayumi Ishii’s work The Breath from Which Clouds are Formed (p. 22–23) is a grid of photographs that look at first glance to be images of individual clouds. Half the photographs are pictures of clouds, while the remainder are photographs the artist has taken of the effects of her breath on paper treated with thermochromic pigment, a material that changes color at a specific temperature. Ishii used a blue thermochromic pigment that was stable at 59°F or below, but changed to completely clear above 77°F. The artist painted the pigment onto white board and then exhaled onto the board, with the warmth of her breath turning the blue pigment clear. Since the pigment would revert to blue as soon as it cooled down, Ishii recorded the pigment’s temporary state via photography. The Breath from Which Clouds are Formed, although artificial and poetic, pictures an absolute truth: by merely breathing we participate in forming the atmosphere.

atmosphere. Gaseous oxygen is colorless and tasteless, and its invisibility can lull us into thinking of it as an abstraction, but the artist’s simple gesture has made the gas critical to life on earth powerfully manifest. Much of Nomura’s approach to art making is more closely aligned with science than art, but looking at Time Arrow silhouetted against the sky outside the window, rationality is easily forgotten and at least for a moment wonder takes over. The drama and grandeur of the atmosphere has been optically rendered from the Renaissance to the

In a window in the exhibition adjacent to Ishii’s grid of photographs is what looks like a tall glass beaker of boiling water. Closer inspection raises questions: there appears to be frost around the opening of the beaker and the liquid is a beautiful, pale blue. The beaker is actually a Dewar flask, an insulated, double-walled glass container built like a thermos bottle, and a wall label reveals the contents to be not water, but liquid oxygen. Time Arrow: Oxygen -183° C (p. 25) is a work by Hitoshi Nomura, an artist whose five-decade-long career has engaged with the passage of time, the properties of matter, and the cyclical nature of the universe. Every day before the Museum opens, a preparator fills Nomura’s flask with liquid oxygen and it’s gone within several hours—boiled away back into the surrounding

Hitoshi Nomura Time Arrow: Oxygen -183° C, 1993 Courtesy of the artist and Fergus McCaffrey, New York

25.

Ellen Harvey The Mermaid: Two Incompatible Systems Intimately Linked (detail showing panels 17â&#x20AC;&#x201C;20 of 20), 2019 Courtesy of the artist and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, and DANESE/COREY, New York Photo: Etienne Frossard 26.

27.

Jitish Kallat Rain Study (the hour of the day of the month of the season), 2017 Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York

28.

present, but it was photography that gave us the tools to truly understand the sky in a comprehensive manner. From the birth of photography in the nineteenth century, artists have been influenced by the camera, specifically in the way it could freeze transient phenomenon, including changing weather conditions. But photography has its limitations, particularly due to its nature as a mechanical process that gives equal weight to everything before the lens. Making a painting from a photograph is a way around this dilemma, not only because of the editorial process of the artist’s mind, but also through the hand’s humanization of the camera’s technology. The source of the images in Damian Loeb’s painting is photographic, but the artist’s complex process results in works that transcend their origins. The sky has been a growing preoccupation of the artist, as witnessed by his trip to Wyoming in 2017 with specialized photographic equipment to record the total solar eclipse, a pilgrimage that combined art and science in equal measure. Loeb, through his painting process, creates experiences that are closer to how we perceive the world, both visually and emotionally, than is possible with technology alone. The artist’s painting The Big Dipper (p. 24) looks out into space—a situation only possible at night—through a veil of clouds illuminated by light pollution generated by the city below. Not only does our burning of fossil fuels warm the atmosphere, but it also increasingly obscures the night sky with both the haze and the glare from our wastefulness.

to Cape Sable in the Gulf of Mexico. The painting pictured from above what is considered one of the areas in the US most vulnerable to sea-level rise, as well as a landscape where the forces of development have attempted to reclaim swampland since the nineteenth century. Harvey wasn’t sure if the powers that be in Miami would be open to a work of art that pointed to the city’s tenuous grip to dry land, but she quickly came to understand that South Florida is one of the few places in the country where the impact of global warming is fully understood. The design for The Mermaid: Two Incompatible Systems Intimately Linked (p. 26–27) was accepted, and Harvey’s painting was transferred onto etched glass panels for the convention center. In the winter of 2017, when Harvey began the painting (it took a year to complete), the average surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico never fell below 73°F, for the first time on record.9 The Mermaid is a snapshot that documents a fragile landscape that will be drastically altered within our lifetimes. Jitish Kallat’s practice has increasing turned toward mediation between individuality and the impersonal forces of nature. Included in this exhibition are representative works from two ongoing projects that at first glance seem to be at odds with one another— one that uses rain and the other that utilizes fire. Rain and fire are phenomena that are both essential and destructive to life on earth: rain is nourishing when moderate and catastrophic when in excess; fire is a force of renewal for the planet’s forests, while also the agent that creates carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. The underlying structure of Kallat’s Wind Study (Hilbert Curve) is a drawing based on a Hilbert curve, a fractal space-filling mathematical curve used in computer science to map and order digital space. Kallat rendered the curve with a flammable adhesive and periodically brought the drawing outdoors, where he ignited segments of the curve. The soot produced by the burning segment was blown by the prevailing winds into swirling patterns that adhere to the paper, recording controlled chaos on top of mathematical certainty. The control and utilization of fire is one of

In 2015 Ellen Harvey answered an open call by the Miami Beach Art in Public Places Program to propose a work of art that would span the 100-foot-wide wall above the bank of doorways that led into the newly revamped Miami Beach Convention Center. Harvey, who is known for creating site-responsive public art that comments on physical or social situations, thoughtfully considered Miami Beach and its environs and proposed a painting, rendered from satellite images provided by the United States Department of Agriculture Photography Field Office, of the 100-mile-wide swath of landscape running from Miami Beach southwest across the Everglades

29.

Colin McMullan (Emcee C.M.) Tree Spa for Urban Forest Healing, 2018 Top: Interior of maple-syrup-evaporator trailer with project participants Bottom: Sauna trailer interior Courtesy of the artist 30.

humankind’s most basic tools, used for everything from cooking our food to forging our metals. The feathers of carbon on the Wind Studies not only record Kallat’s specific acts, but also speak of the archetypal patterns that categorize all fires. As Weather Report is opening wildfires are ravishing the Amazon basin, central Africa, Alaska, and Siberia, not only releasing soot and carbon dioxide, but also reducing the amount of vegetation that can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.

Collaborating with the Keney Park Sustainability Project, an organization formed by activist Herb Virgo to rebuild a neglected park in Hartford’s north end, McMullan expanded the Maple Syrup Club’s activities into the park, creating not only syrup, but also educational experiences for the area’s residents. McMullan was aware of the debate within the maple-sugaring community about the environmental impact of burning wood to boil down the sap into syrup, and came up with a solution that symbolically engaged the process, transforming the activity of urban agriculture into a public art project. The resulting Tree Spa for Urban Forest Healing (p. 30) is a wood-fired maple-sugar evaporator that uses waste steam to power a full-sized sauna. The Tree Spa is being brought to The Aldrich in March 2020 during sugaring season and will be making syrup from maples in the immediate neighborhood as well as the surrounding community. One fact looms large over the Tree Spa and its activities: global warming is pushing the range of acer saccharum further north. It is envisioned that in as few as fifty years the climate of southern New England will resemble that of current coastal Virginia, which is outside the natural habitat of the tree.

Kallat’s Rain Studies (p. 28) initially appear to be astronomical charts, but their structure is a collaboration between the artist and the sky above his studio. Their star-like patterns are actually produced by raindrops that have fallen through stencils onto paper and are then recorded by the spraying of water-resistant pigment. Some of the drawings also have grids rendered in water-soluble pencil that are altered by the falling rain. Kallat notes on each drawing the date and time of its production, as well as the “B.C.”—breath cycle— the number of times he inhaled/exhaled during the period of exposure, establishing alignment between himself, the drawing, and the surrounding environment. Kallat produces his Rain Studies only during India’s monsoon season, which runs from June through September, further tying them to specific weather conditions.

Clearly, trees participate in the earth’s atmosphere more than any other terrestrial vegetation. Pat Pickett is engaged in a long-running experimental drawing project in which she collaborates with trees to manifest environmental conditions. Attaching pens to the tips of tree branches, she positions paper mounted on sturdy tripods at the pen’s point, allowing the trees to record their movement in the wind (p. 32). Her work is related to the modernist tradition of automatic drawing, but its impulse is substantially different: documenting expression from a life form that lives on a radically different time scale. Trees experience the world in ways we can’t understand and possess what can only be considered an alien form of intelligence, with recent research pointing to their communicating with each other through both air and soil. Trees evolved in the turbulence of the atmosphere, and their structure and ability to move in the wind speak of deep evolutionary adaptations.

The seasons clearly affect life on earth, but recent evidence goes further to suggest that seasonality has played a key role in generating biodiversity. In the northeastern United States the coming of spring induces the sugar maple, acer saccharum, to start sending sap up from its roots into its trunk in preparation for bud and leaf production. Colin McMullan, an interdisciplinary artist whose work touches on environmentalism, New England history and land use, community organizing, and political activism, was exposed to maple sugaring as a child growing up in eastern Connecticut. Teaching at the Hartford Art School in 2016, with a group of students he started the Hartford Maple Syrup Club, a project that organized students and others to begin to tap and make syrup from maples in urban Hartford.

31.

Pat Pickett Sugar Pine â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 1 hr. Santa Susana Mountains. October 29, 2015, 2015 Courtesy of the artist and The Drawing Room, East Hampton, NY 32.

ecology, and wind and storm damage to both trees and forests. At the conference Pickett met researcher Amanda Bunce, who presented “Driving Factors of Tree Sway in Temperate Deciduous Forests of the Northeastern United States.” Bunce is a researcher with Eversource Energy Center’s Stormwise Project at the University of Connecticut, a forest management program that was initiated following a series of catastrophic storms to the region and has the goal of reducing the risk of tree-related damage to power lines. Bunce manages monitoring equipment on trees in three study forests in Connecticut, compiling data both on the motion of individual trees as well as on the surrounding forest. Bunce, collaborating with Joel Salisbury and Michael Vertefeuille of the university’s Digital Experience Lab, has installed an inclinometer on a white pine tree on the Museum’s campus that links to a graphic interface designed

Pickett’s drawings done with trees reveal not only the character of the wind in a particular place on a certain day, but also—and more importantly—the qualities of the specific tree. On the lower margin of each drawing, she records the species name, time elapsed, location (frequently with brief details of weather conditions), and the time and date. We can’t see the wind—we can only see its effects on the physical world. Moving air, on the most basic level, is sound. These drawings are to trees what the groove of a record is to the human voice. In 2017 Pickett attended the International Conference on Wind and Trees, organized in Boulder, Colorado, by the International Union of Forest Research Organization. (She was the only artist present.) These conferences, occurring every three years, bring together scientists who study climatology, tree biomechanics, wind flow, forest

tree sway monitor [41.2770, -73.4958] uconn natural resources department x digital experience lab [LIVE VIDEO FEED 13:59 MAR 19 2019]

dynamic properties of a tree sway freq: 0.34Hz

sways per second calculated with last 10 minutes of data

sway amplitude: 0.5M

how far the tree is leaning from its resting position

The white pine [Pinus strobus] is native to eastern North America from Newfoundland south to Georgia. The white pine is a common tree, important to wildlife and the logging economy. Few old-growth or virgin stands remain in the US. Changes in the climate are expected to cause a decrease in white pine due to higher temperatures in the southern portion of its range, coastal forest loss from flooding, and increased prevalence of destructive insects.

weather station ridgefield fire hq temp: 19C humidity: 25% precip: 0 in/hr dewpoint: 69F pressure: 29.88in uv: -wind speed: 12mph wind dir: 215, SW

WHITE PINE [Pinus strobus] HT:50M DBH:42CM CROWN DIAMETER: AVG 10M

Amanda Bunce in collaboration with Joel Salisbury and Michael Vertefeuille Tree Sway (digital rendering), 2019 Courtesy Eversource Energy Center’s Stormwise Project and Digital Experience Lab, University of Connecticut, Storrs 33.

Bryan Nash Gill Ash, 2003 Courtesy of Bryan Nash Gill Studio, LLC

34.

Jennifer Steinkamp Fly to Mars 2 (video still), 2004 Private collection Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul 35.

by Salisbury and Vertefeuille. The movement of the tree in the wind is manifested graphically on a monitor, acting as a live weather station for the exhibition. Parallel to Pickett’s work, Tree Sway (p. 33) reveals that the distance between art and science is often just a question of circumstance.

environments that tap into the elemental forces animating life. Attending both art school and taking classes at CalTech in the 1980s, Steinkamp was exposed to the then nascent field of digital animation that was quickly being adopted by Hollywood. The artist has mentioned science fiction as an influence, but her work is more closely aligned with the visionary and utopian, providing the viewer with experiences that are often hallucinatory in nature. In Fly to Mars 2 (p. 35), Steinkamp has created her version of the axis mundi—the mythic and timeless tree at the center of the cosmos. Writhing in a wind that can only be considered otherworldly, Steinkamp’s tree cycles through the seasons in an endless, looping succession. Fly to Mars 2 has two clocks running on different time scales: the predictable yearly cycle from spring through winter measured by changes in foliage, and the temporal dance of the tree’s branches. Steinkamp’s animation dramatizes the aphorism “Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.”11

Trees don’t just react to weather conditions in the moment, but also act as sensitive historians, recording climate conditions in their yearly growth rings. Bryan Nash Gill worked with wood as a primary medium beginning in the 1980s, but in 2003 he inked a cross-section of the trunk of an ash tree, pressed a piece of paper against it, and pulled a print (p. 34). Reducing the idea of a woodblock print to its essence, Gill allowed the wood itself to create an image, distancing the artist’s hand from the process in a manner reminiscent of Pickett’s tree-movement self-portraits. Traditional approaches to picturing the weather usually result in a moment frozen in time, but Gill’s tree prints speak of the climate in years and decades. Scientists began keeping accurate records of the weather only in the late nineteenth century, and it wasn’t until the 1930s that researchers realized tree rings held a chronology that could push an understanding of climate change back into the distant past. For instance, by studying ancient trees, such as those preserved in Native American architecture in the Southwest, the current, two-decade-long drought on the Colorado River has been proved to be the longest since medieval times.10 Gill’s woodblocks, one of which is included in this exhibition, not only contain information about fluctuations in the weather, but are literally made out of carbon vacuumed in the past from the earth’s atmosphere.

If it seems that trees have been overemphasized in this exhibition, consider the idea put forward this year by Swiss researcher Tom Crowther to plant one trillion new trees to combat climate change. The nonprofit Project Drawdown, which ranks climate solutions by the amount of CO 2 they could remove from the atmosphere, places Crowther’s plan among the top fifteen most effective actions that can be taken now to diminish global warming.12 “Climate change is seen as such an immense and complicated issue,” Crowther has stated. “I’d like to try and champion this as a solution that everyone can get involved in. If all the millions of people who went on climate marches in recent weeks got involved in tree planting the impact would be huge.”13 Of course, this idea of planting trees to help the environment is not new. In 1982 artist and activist Joseph Beuys initiated 7,000 Oaks, a project for Documenta 7, an exhibition of contemporary art that happens every five years in Kassel, Germany. Beuys proposed that 7,000 oak trees would be planted in the city, each adjacent to a columnar piece of

The natural world pulses with breath and movement, and watching a forest sway in the wind is not dissimilar from watching the rhythmic oscillation of seaweed in a tidal pool as waves break and retreat. In our preoccupation we rarely pause to truly experience nature, and it seems we increasingly need to turn to art to awaken our sense of wonder. For three decades Jennifer Steinkamp has been creating immersive video

36.

basalt. 7,000 Oaks took five years to complete, and it was extended into an ongoing project of tree planting around the world. Beuys was a cofounder in 1980 of Germany’s Green Party, whose political legacy has been at the root of much current activism on issues of climate change.

1. I am indebted to numerous authors for much of the factual information presented. Books that have been particularly useful include Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), Sam Kean’s Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us (New York: Little, Brown, 2017), and Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018). 2. C. S. Zerefos et al., “Further Evidence of Important Environmental Information Content in Red-to-Green Ratios as Depicted in Paintings by Great Masters,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, March 25, 2014, doi.org/10.5194/acp-14-2987-2014. 3. Interview with the artist, September 2007, repr. Art21.org, November 2011, Art21.org/read/inigo-manglano-ovalle-climate/. 4. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 67. 5. Diana Sette, “Artist Nick Cave Talks about Surrendering to the Sacred,” interview, Hyperallergic, April 16, 2019, Hyperallergic.com. 6. Science 189, no. 4201 (August 8, 1975): 460–63. 7. Unfortunately, CFC’s replacement, HFC (hydrofluorocarbon), is a greenhouse gas that has a much greater capacity to warm the atmosphere than CO2. Salvaging HFCs from old refrigeration

Weather Report is presented at a time when the facts provided by science are under attack by many, not just on the subject of global warming, but even extending to irrefutable issues such as the age of the earth. The artists included in this exhibition are not necessarily environmental activists, but all of their work exhibits an understanding of and empathy for the atmosphere that can awaken a sense of engagement and responsibility, potential first steps for social and political action. It is hoped that the totality of the experience of this exhibition opens both the mind and the eye to what envelops as well as infuses us. Writing in On the Road, Jack Kerouac got it right: “For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.”14

and air-conditioning equipment has become a priority in attempts to stop global warming. 8. “Byron Kim, Sunday Paintings 1/7/01–2/11/18,” press release, James Cohan Gallery, New York, JamesCohan.com. 9. Jason Samenow, “Gulf of Mexico waters are freakishly warm, which could mean explosive springtime storms,” Washington Post, March 22, 2017, WashingtonPost.com. 10. Jim Robbins, “Chronicles of the Rings: What Trees Tell Us,” New York Times, April 30, 2019. 11. This aphorism has been attributed to figures as diverse as British geographer Andrew John Herbertson, author Mark Twain, and science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, among others. 12. “Summary of Solutions by Overall Rank,” DrawDown.org. 13. Mark Tutton, “The most effective way to tackle climate change? Plant 1 trillion trees,” CNN World, April 17, 2019. CNN.com. 14. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 1999), 281.

Richard Klein, Exhibitions Director

37.

Works in the Exhibition All dimensions h x w x d in inches unless otherwise noted Bigert & Bergström (b. 1965 and 1962) The Russian Campaign 1812, 2017 Painted stainless steel 118 x 118 x 11¾

Josh Callaghan (b. 1969) Chicago Snow 6, 2013 EPS foam, urethane resin, sand, marble, glass 15 x 26 x 11

Teutoburg Forest 9 CE, 2017 Painted stainless steel 54 x 86 x 38½

Chicago Snow 7, 2013 EPS foam, urethane resin, sand, marble, glass 11 x 16 x 13½

Courtesy of the artists and Belenius Gallery, Stockholm

Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles

Barbara Bloom (b. 1951) Some flawed place in the iron dark of the world. (McCarthy), 2015 Hand-tufted woolen carpet with carved braille text Edition #1 of 3 108 x 72 Courtesy of the artist and David Lewis Gallery, New York

Nick Cave (b. 1959) Tondo, 2018 Mixed media including wire, bugle beads, sequined fabric, wood 72 diameter Private collection Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Sara Bouchard (b. 1982) Weather Box, 2014 Cardboard, music box mechanism, 12 punch cards Edition #8 of 20 Box: 2½ x 3½ x 1¾ Punch cards: 1⅝ x 22 x 1/16 each Courtesy of the artist

Violet Dennison (b. 1989) Mirror Stage, 2018 Guts of 2 Elkay EZ8L wallmounted water coolers 36¾ x 19 x 255/16 Courtesy of the artist and Jan Kaps, Cologne

Amanda Bunce (b. 1985) in collaboration with Joel Salisbury and Michael Vertefeuille Tree Sway, 2019 White pine tree, biaxial inclinometer and data logger; graphic interface: custom software, 49” LCD monitor Dimensions variable Graphic layout design: Allie Marsh Courtesy Eversource Energy Center’s Stormwise Project and the Digital Experience Lab, University of Connecticut, Storrs

Andy Goldsworthy (b. 1956) Gutter Water – Night, Times Square, New York, March 6, 2010, 2010 Suite of 30 unique inkjet prints 14 x 10½ each; 72 x 65½ overall Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong & Co., New York Nancy Graves (1939–1995) First Look at the World’s Weather, 1973 Acrylic, India ink, gouache on paper 22½ x 60 Untitled (Heat Density Measurement of a Cyclone), 1974 Watercolor, gold leaf, graphite on paper 22½ x 30 Courtesy of the Nancy Graves Foundation and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York Ellen Harvey (b. 1967) The Mermaid: Two Incompatible Systems Intimately Linked, 2019 Acrylic and oil on 48 of 60 aluminum panels 40 x 60 each; 120 x 960 overall Courtesy of the artist and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, and DANESE/COREY, New York

Bryan Nash Gill (1961–2013) Ash, 2003 Wood relief print on Okawara paper Edition #11 of 15 Artist Variations 56 x 533/4

Ayumi Ishii (b. 1980) The Breath from Which the Clouds Are Formed, 2015 50 digital prints 6 x 8 each; 33 x 87 overall Courtesy of the artist

Ash Block, 2003 Ash wood, ink 103/4 x 501/2 x 461/2 Courtesy of Bryan Nash Gill Studio, LLC

38.

Jitish Kallat (b. 1974) Rain Study (the hour of the day of the month of the season), 2017 Graphite, acrylic epoxy on Arches paper 15 x 10 Rain Study (the hour of the day of the month of the season), 2017 Graphite, acrylic epoxy on Arches paper 15 x 10 Rain Study (the hour of the day of the month of the season), 2017 Graphite, acrylic epoxy on Arches paper 20 x 16 Rain Study (the hour of the day of the month of the season), 2017 Graphite, acrylic epoxy on Arches paper 20 x 16 Wind Study (Hilbert Curve), 2017 Burnt adhesive, aquarelle pencil, graphite on paper 89 x 55⅛ Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York Kim Keever (b. 1950) Abstract 10298, 2016 Archival inkjet print 40 x 50 Abstract 21871, 2016 Archival inkjet print 36 x 51 Courtesy of the artist and Jerald Melberg Gallery, North Carolina

Byron Kim (b. 1961) Sunday Painting 2/24/19 Sunday Painting 3/4/19 Sunday Painting 3/10/19 Sunday Painting 3/17/19 Sunday Painting 3/24/19 Sunday Painting 3/31/19 Sunday Painting 4/7/19 Sunday Painting 4/17/19 Sunday Painting 4/21/19 Sunday Painting 4/28/19 Sunday Painting 5/5/19 All 2019 All acrylic and pencil on panel 14 x 14 each Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York Damian Loeb (b. 1970) The Big Dipper, 2016 Oil on linen 60 x 60 Courtesy of the artist and Acquavella Galleries Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (b. 1961) Storm Prototype, 2007 Fiberglass, aluminum leaf 2 units, 60 x 60 x 108 each Courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago

Pat Pickett (b. 1953) California Sycamore – 30 mins. – Santa Inez Canyon – Santa Monica Mountains April 2002, 2002 10 x 71/2

Colin McMullan (Emcee C.M.) (b. 1979) Tree Spa for Urban Forest Healing, 2018 Social/Public Project (maple sap, maple steam, maple syrup, maple, oak, pine, cedar, fir, cotton, OSB, tar paper, steel, aluminum, polyisocyanurate, polycarbonate, vinyl, rubber, fiberglass, glass, paint, hardware, electronics, signage, light, fire, time, conversation) 2 trailers, 16’ x 8’ x 10’ each

Canyon Live Oak – 1 hr. – stiff afternoon Breezes Above Topanga – April – 2002, 2002 10 x 71/2 Indian Banyon – 1/2 hr. Trade Winds 6–10 mph – Waikiki Park – December 2002, 2002 10 x 8

Performance: March 21, 2020 Produced in collaboration with the Keney Park Sustainability Project, Knox Parks, and Hartford Maple Syrup Club. Originally commissioned by Artspace, Inc., for City-Wide Open Studios with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Office of the Arts. The project has received additional support from Macktez, Real Art Ways, A4A, and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, as well as individual donors.

Pine – Griffith Park – 1.5 hr. – May 24 – 2002 (Knobcone Pine), 2002 10 x 71/2 Pinyon Pine – 1 hr. – late afternoon, light desert air – Pinyon Flats – November 3, 2002, 2002 10 x 8 SUBALPINE FIR – 8200’ at Saddle Junction above Idyllwild – 5–6 pm Sunday June 16, 2002, 2002 10 x 71/2

Clouds Filtered through Trees, 2019 Installation (glass, steel, vinyl, hardware, rainwater, sapwood, signage) Dimensions variable This work is inspired in part by xylem-filter research at MIT.

European Beech – 1/2 hr. – onshore breeze – Ocean Rd. Bridgehampton, NY 2004, 2004 10½ x 8½ Sugar Pine – 1 hr. Santa Susana Mountains. October 29, 2015, 2015 13 x 10

Courtesy of the artist Hitoshi Nomura (b. 1945) Time Arrow: Oxygen -183° C, 1993 Dewar glass flask, liquid oxygen 19¾ x 8¼ diameter Courtesy of the artist and Fergus McCaffrey, New York

All Ink on paper Courtesy of the artist and The Drawing Room, East Hampton, NY

39.

Sean Salstrom (b. 1976) Indefinity Box, 2011/2019 Glass, water, helium, weather balloons, monofilament line 1,800' x 18 x 18 Performances: October 6, 2019, and March 21, 2020 Courtesy of the artist Jennifer Steinkamp (b. 1958) Fly to Mars 2, 2004 High-definition digital-video projection Artist’s proof #1 Dimensions variable Private collection Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Founded by Larry Aldrich in 1964, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is dedicated to fostering the work of innovative artists whose ideas and interpretations of the world around us serve as a platform to encourage creative thinking. The only museum in Connecticut devoted to contemporary art, The Aldrich has engaged its community with thought-provoking exhibitions and education programs throughout its fifty-five-year history. Board of Trustees Eric Diefenbach, Chair; Diana Bowes, Vice-Chair; Linda M. Dugan, Treasurer; Claude K. Amadeo, Secretary; Michael Joo; Patricia Kemp; Kristina Larson; Neil Marcus; Amy Pal; Julie Phillips; Andrew J. Pitts; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Kathleen O’Grady, Chair Emerita; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder Cybele Maylone, Executive Director

Weather Report October 6, 2019, to March 29, 2020 Organized by Richard Klein In conjunction with Weather Report, The Aldrich, in partnership with the Meteorology Club at Western Connecticut State University, WCSU’s Macricostas School of Arts & Sciences Meteorology Program, WCSU’s Department of Art, and the New York City/ Long Island Chapter of the American Meteorological Society, has organized a one-day cross-disciplinary symposium investigating the intersection of art and weather on October 19, 2019 at the Ives Concert Hall of Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. The diverse range of speakers, including researchers, curators, and artists will present on the many ways weather informs their work and reflects our collective experience. Participants include WCBS 880 chief radio meteorologist Craig Allen; forest management researcher Amanda Bunce; Arthur Ross Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections at the New York Botanical Garden, Todd Forrest; the Museum’s exhibitions director and curator of Weather Report, Richard Klein; and the artists Kim Keever, Colin McMullan, and Pat Pickett. A screening of Mats Bigert and Lars Bergström’s film The Weather War (2012) will be included as part of the symposium.

Published by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 258 Main Street Ridgefield, CT 06877, USA 203.438.4519 aldrichart.org ISBN: 978-0-9994533-4-6 Design: Gretchen Kraus Copy Editor: Mary Cason Printer: GHP Media Cover: Kim Keever Abstract 21871 (detail), 2016 Courtesy of the artist and Jerald Melberg Gallery, NC Inside front and back cover: Sunset from the International Space Station (ISS023-E-57948), May, 25, 2010 Courtesy NASA and the ISS Crew Earth Observation Experiment and Images Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center, Houston

Generous funding for Weather Report is provided by Kathleen O’Grady, The O’Grady Foundation, Anita and Nick Donofrio, and Kirsten and Andy Pitts.

BIGERT & BERGSTRÖM BARBARA BLOOM SARA BOUCHARD A M A N DA B U N C E I N C O L L A B O R AT I O N WITH JOEL SALISBURY AND MICHAEL VERTEFEUILLE JOSH CALLAGHAN NICK CAVE VIOLET DENNISON B R YA N N A S H G I L L A N DY G O L D S W O R T H Y NANCY GRAVES ELLEN HARVEY AY U M I I S H I I J I T I S H K A L L AT KIM KEEVER BY RO N K I M DAMIAN LOEB IÑIGO MANGLANO-OVALLE COLIN MCMULLAN HITOSHI NOMURA PAT P I C K E T T SEAN SALSTROM JENNIFER STEINKAMP