“The annual carbon emissions of the global art market has been estimated at 70 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2021 by the environmental arts charity Julie’s Bicycle. That is more than the national emissions of several European countries, such as Austria or Greece.”
—Joe Ware, The Art Newspaper, October 11, 2024
Art criticism today regularly focuses on the relationship between carbon footprints and the international art world. From coverage about publicized environmental protests that vandalize museum objects to quantifiable reports that measure the environmental cost of globe-trotting art-star events, art journalism has its eye not just on art, but on its ecological effect on the world. Put in less abstract terms, every round-trip ticket flight between New York and London, New York Magazine reports, “costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.” This statistic is catastrophic for any market that is reliant on global mobility. Until airlines discover an alternate form of fuel powerful enough, sustainable enough, and affordable enough to divest entirely from fossil fuels, however, the industry is stuck in the hot seat.
Not that you can tell from the outside. Airports are getting more and more upgrades, as though — and despite offhand slogans and advertisements through which airlines announce their aspiring carbon neutrality — the emphasis is rather on a “seamless, personalized [airport] experience,” designed to eclipse any doubts about one’s complicit belief in air travel. Art, in these settings, often serves a similar purpose.
In recent years, airports have rebranded themselves as high end malls and art venues — as though a space designed for waiting has been transformed into a space of diversion, a space with more and more, usually locally produced art. The SFO Museum, for instance, currently has twenty-three ongoing and ephemeral exhibitions situated throughout the airport, and organized by category: General Exhibitions, Aviation Exhibitions, Photography Exhibitions, Student Art, Video Arts, Harvey Milk Exhibition, and “Kids’ Spot.” These range from a continuous interactive mural of birds by Walter Kitundu, “San Francisco Bay Area Bird Encounters,” to a series of pre-security vitrines dedicated to decorative tiles, “California Decorative Tile,” to a solo photo show, “Ricardo Alvarado: Capturing a Cultural Legacy.” These shows vary greatly but all serve San Francisco Airport’s mission to delight and captivate the global viewer, while celebrating aviation and local Bay Area history.
Certainly the exhibitions provide thoughtful opportunities for engagement — slot machines, for instance, or photographs of famous local music events. Yet one can’t help but feel like they could go further, particularly in relation to the engine driving the framework. If artists protest the TATE Modern without placing its exhibition program at risk, can artists protest the airport without endangering its programming? To what extent is criticality possible? Currently at SFO Museum’s Harvey Milk Terminal space is an installation dedicated to The AIDS Memorial Quilt, an initiative spearheaded initially in San Francisco during the 1980s in the face of inadequate government response to the epidemic. The quilt was initiated by Cleve Jones, who co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation upon realizing that over 1,000 San Francisco residents had died of AIDS-related causes without public acknowledgment. Because it is a marker of local history, perhaps this show gets a pass. Or, more cynically, the dedication of the Milk Terminal, as part of a $2.5 billion project, is leveraged to whitewash the industry’s complicity in petroleum consumption. No matter how energy efficient the building itself is, airlines pollute the region and the world at large.
Chicago’s O’Hare Airport also presents exhibitions which are similarly exclusive to passengers, most of whom have not come to the airport for an art experience. Indeed, the City of Chicago debuted a $3.5 million dollar art commission (the city’s largest art acquisition in 30 years) featuring a curated collection of mid-career Chicago artists in Terminal 5. The curatorial team behind this endeavor, Behar X Schachman, installed a series of vitrines along the arrival corridor which disembarking passengers must pass through on their way to immigration. The corridor is often crowded with people waiting to be processed and admitted into the country. As the curators put it, “The corridor is a space made of expectation, you are almost somewhere, you are almost in customs, almost outside of the airport, almost in Chicago, almost on ‘the other side.’”
In “Untitled (A Window for Lake Michigan),” Assaf Evron installs a window of lush, blue hanging curtains, open in two places to reveal the backdrop of Lake Michigan. You might imagine you were looking upon the real lake, except for a third framed photograph hung on the curtain that reveals the image for what it is, calling attention to the photograph’s stillness. “Mayumi Lake, Shinsekai Yori (新世界より) | From the New World” is a lush collage evoking a figure swimming in clouds, depicted in flowers native to Chicago and Japan.
Maryam Taghavi’s “Spell for Passage” and Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương’s “chân trời foot of the sky” both afford spiritual protection to the travelers waiting to arrive. Other works address the idea of walking together and celebratory inclusion, as with Selina Trepp’s vibrantly colored animation, “We Walk Together at O’Hare,” and Cecil McDonald Jr.’s large black and white photoscape of a dance hall crowd, “I Wonder As I Wander.” These works do not call out the fossil fuel industry, but they do leverage the political tensions underlying the pre-immigration corridor not only to welcome travelers from wherever they hearken from but to question further the protocols and standard restrictions categorizing ideas of national belonging.
Subjected to a second Trump presidency, we face the impact of Project 2025, a 900 page policy wish-list that self describes as a “transition project that paves the way for an effective conservative Administration” to “take down the Deep State and return the Government to its people.” Agenda items include banning biological males from women’s sports, “unleashing American energy to reduce rates,” and cutting the growth of government spending to “reduce inflation.”
We now are dealing not only with the undermining and firing of professional civil service staff at a number of key agencies, but further expansion of extractive fossil fuels for the sake of short-term profit (the U.S. is already the world’s leading oil producer). In this regard I am not interested in SFO’s $2.5 billion Terminal 3 West modernization project, nor a personalized and seamless airport experience, one that lulls with its over-bright, hyperactive screens, bespoke handbags, and similarly placating installations that suggest things are normal; they most certainly are not. Rather, these venues should be used to their fullest potential, perhaps in the spirit of O’Hare’s Terminal 5. More importantly, art at the airport can serve to remind us how precious and precarious our world is. Art at SFO, or any hub airport, that tasks itself with raising that awareness helps to promote environmental care, so that we might keep our ice caps from calving.
Caroline Picard is a writer, publisher and curator. Her writing has appeared in Artslant, ArtForum (critics picks), Flash Art International, and Paper Monument, among others. Fiction and comics appear under the name Coco Picard. Her first graphic novel, The Chronicles of Fortune, was published by Radiator Comics in 2017. She is the Executive Director of the Green Lantern Press—a nonprofit publishing house and art producer in operation since 2005. Curating exhibitions since 2005, Picard has worked with artists like Takahiro Iwasaki, Ellen Rothenberg, Edra Soto, Xaviera Simmons, and others, presenting exhibitions at La Box ENSA Bourges, Gallery 400, The Hyde Park Art Center, Vox Popuili and more.
More at her website, cocopicard.com.
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