A major point of discussion in contemporary art is climate change, as many exhibitions address growing concerns about the fate of the environment and our planet. Exhibitions such as the U of T Art Museum’s Dwelling Under Distant Suns address the current and future effects of climate change through the slow violence inflicted on our lives and the land we live on. 

While these exhibitions may address more abstract issues, like focusing on climate change in their content, in installation, they often generate excessive waste. This happens in the form of single-use print and construction materials, and the art pieces’ transit, making them unsustainable. However, curators and artists are coming up with methods of exhibition-making that reduce waste, bringing the focus of sustainability into their daily practices. 

Why does this matter?

Both exhibitions and public art — art displayed outside of galleries or private institutions — contribute to waste directly and indirectly, in the creation of trash and the breakdown of materials into microplastics. Elements such as wallpaper, brochures, construction materials, and paint are neither permanent nor reusable, eventually breaking down into forever chemicals. 

The shipment of these materials and the art itself is also costly, as artworks usually require the construction of custom crates that often cannot be reused. The constant rotation of exhibitions, with larger galleries having multiple temporary exhibitions at once, creates more material waste. 

Now, as landfills in Ontario are running out of space, and the manufacturing of these materials is contributing to air and water pollution in Ontario and the Great Lakes, there is little room for this waste to accumulate. Globally, an estimated 70 million metric tons of carbon dioxide are produced by the visual art world. While this waste is not visible, it is still a major public production of pollution that must be addressed. 

What’s to be done?

Organizations such as Western University’s Centre for Sustainable Curating provide guidance to curators and artists alike through handbooks, programming, and collaborations with sustainability organizations and institutions such as the Synthetic Collective. Their handbook, Using the Resources at Hand: Sustainable Exhibition Design, provides a framework for planning an exhibition with a low carbon footprint. 

The handbook also lists vendors in Ontario for sustainable resourcing of materials such as paper, furniture, moveable walls, technology, paint, and tools. Emphasizing reuse, they highlight the importance of community, illustrating how its support can result in more sustainable practices. Fostering a network of art organizations and vendors allows them to share resources and reuse materials, lessening their joint carbon footprint and level of consumption.  

Sustainable practices are not limited to the physical materials of a gallery exhibit, as print media and public art also play a critical role in waste production from displaying art. The formatting of didactics or wall texts, as well as the methods of distributing printed materials, such as brochures and guides, are significant contributors to waste and pollution. Simple changes, such as changing the type of ink, paper, and size of the media, greatly affect the art exhibit’s carbon footprint. 

These guides implore curators to think more critically about what they create and to be mindful of the space that their work takes up, taking the time to be meaningful with the resources they use. 

In terms of public art, the Centre for Sustainable Curation also breaks down the impact of materials such as paint, steel and concrete that are common in the creation of public and outdoor works, highlighting their resource-intensive manufacturing and the permanence of their breakdown and pollution. Instead, they offer the use of natural materials such as stone, which are low-maintenance and high-impact alternatives. While the use of stone and concrete may seem similar on the surface, their processes of extraction, maintenance, and degradation differ in their impact on the environment. 

These practices might seem irrelevant on a larger scale, especially as these same materials, such as concrete, are being manufactured at such a large scale in other fields. But because contemporary art deals with climate change and its critique in much of its content, it is important to practice what we preach. If the methods that create the messages warning of climate change don’t reflect their own beliefs, what is the point of the message at all? 

These ideas and methods are already being put into motion. For example, the Art Museum at U of T’s exhibition called Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through not only investigates the use of plastic on the macro scale, but also in the context of museum conservation. Displaying both old and new art made of plastic, they challenge what it means to conserve an art object and what its degradation might mean. 

The Plastic Heart DIY Fieldguide outlines some of the sustainable practices they employed, such as limiting shipping, using previous constructions, and replacing vinyl labelling with natural ink printed on recycled paper. This critical eye, reflecting on its own creation, allows for a break in practice, reevaluating the carbon footprint of exhibitions and challenging their ability to reduce their impact, contributing to a new standard of sustainability within art curation. 

A bigger picture? 

These practices can extend beyond the art world, as methods of reusing can apply to the cultural sector as a whole. Art galleries and museums are conductors of education and culture, reflecting the actions and values that dominate society. Therefore, the way in which we approach the curation of a gallery is a reflection of the way that we curate the world we live in. 

Dehlia Hannah, an associate professor of Environmental Aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen, muses on the current state of the world that artists find themselves in, in a call for presentations focused on environmental restoration in museums, describing it as “postcolonial landscapes of extraction and recuperation, great plastic garbage patches in the oceans, urban sewage treatment plants, burning forests, and oil palm plantations.” 

In a world so ravaged by the effects of climate change, the work in a gallery is no longer confined to the physical space it inhabits; its methods of creation bleed outside of the gallery walls and into the land it takes root on. 

Why art?

If you ask ten people to define art, you will get ten definitions. If you ask me, an artwork and its display are the reflection of the experience and expression of the artist and their environment. The method in which it is displayed to the public is incredibly deliberate, as art is the sum of the visual and philosophical decisions of its artist. 

In this sense, how an exhibition materializes shapes our perspective on waste and frivolity on a larger scale, as these methods of expression become a part of the cultural zeitgeist. Creating sustainable curatorial practices is critical in the creation and engagement of culture and art, slowly shaping the values of society.