Last July, early morning hikers witnessed fog slowly flowing down a local canyon like a grey, vaporous glacier. You can picture this weather event.
How about the climate system? The climate system is no less real than a fog bank but much more difficult to picture, to imagine. Can we picture the climate system undergoing catastrophic change?
At the Huntington Library, the Boone Gallery now features Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis, curated by Melinda McCurdy, Karla Nielsen, and Kristen Anthony.
Running until January 6, 2025, the exhibit presents artistic and scientific materials created after Great Britain’s coal-powered industrial revolution took off in the 1780s.
The exhibit begins with British authors, artists, and scientists, takes in American naturalist Henry David Thoreau, examines Jamaica’s struggle with colonialism, explores photos of California’s Yosemite Valley, and closes with Los Angeles’s oil boom of 1890 to 1930.
Works by the English art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) and the contemporary Mexican-American artist and UCLA professor Rebeca Méndez bookend the exhibit.
Storm Cloud juxtaposes art and science to show how, in their mutual influence, they can provoke a leap from ecological consciousness of pollution to climatological awareness of the current planetary-scale ecological emergency.
This emergency involves the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Burning fossil fuels dumps extra carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere and drives global warming.
The burning started in earnest during the industrial revolution’s early decades and brought Ruskin to his awareness of air pollution.
As Storm Cloud’s catalog explains, in 1884 Ruskin gave lectures in London about a strange, relatively new local phenomenon: the smog from coal use’s massive uptick over the preceding century. Ruskin saw this smog as an ominous storm cloud. He titled his lectures The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. The exhibit’s title riffs on Ruskin’s.
Ruskin had his drawings of atmospheric phenomena transferred to transparencies so he could project them for his lecture audience by using a magic lantern. The exhibit’s first room includes such a lantern. Ruskin’s drawings are projected onto a wall. Words from Ruskin’s lectures surround you, for example: “every breath of air you draw is polluted.”
Can you read the writing on the wall?
For cleaner air, go to the second room and encounter work by the British poet William Wordsworth.
Scorning London, in 1799 Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy took up residence in England’s Lake District, British Romanticism’s ground zero, at least for the “Lake Poets” Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Those two in 1798 had published a poetry collection they cowrote, Lyrical Ballads, that set off British Romantic poetry.
In this room Dorothy’s handwritten journal lays open to pages recording her observations from a hike up the Lake District’s Scafell Peak. You are looking at her actual journal she held in her hands. Students of literature, feel free to geek out.
There’s also a copy of A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England, written by Dorothy’s brother. The Lake District had become popular for walking tours by the 1770s. The Lake Poets’ work boosted this enthusiasm.
Students of literature, feel free to geek out.
Notice the photo of what looks like an open powder compact (the top half holds a mirror) but actually is a Claude Lorrain glass, named after the seventeenth-century French landscape painter and in the Romantic period au courant for Lake District hikes.
At a picturesque spot, turn around, open your Claude glass, and look at the scene in the mirror tinted to make the landscape image appear like a painting. If this reminds you of hiking Pasadena-adjacent Eaton Canyon so you can turn around, hold up your phone, and take a selfie with waterfall, you are not wrong. Romantic landscape aesthetics remain with us.
About hiking, another room includes Henry David Thoreau’s walking stick and manuscript pages of Walden (1854), Thoreau’s work newly readable as ecological philosophy.
Make sure to notice that William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay, Kent–A Recollection of October 5th 1858 has a museum label written by Jan Zalasiewicz explaining the painting’s engagement with deep geological time. Yes, that Jan Zalasiewicz, rockstar in the climate-science world.
Slow down when considering American painter Frederic Edwin Church’s 1867 Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica. This painting hangs in the section about Jamaica and was completed during Britain’s colonial rule over the Caribbean island (1655-1962).
The Spanish had brought captured Africans to Jamaica as slaves, a practice continued by the British, who established sugar plantations. You learn that plantation agriculture resulted in deforestation, which exacerbated the effects of droughts. Slavery ended in Jamaica in 1834, with Britain abolishing the practice.
On the right, puffs of cloud, blue skies, and a river valley; mountain ranges to the left, past which, through dark storm clouds, a low sun pours light across the scene: Church’s painting appears to depict “nature,” unmarked by human activity, what colonialism defined as terra nullius (“land of no one”) ripe for colonization.
Yet a placard informs visitors about the Jamaican Maroons: escapees from Spanish and then English slavery who established free communities in Jamaica’s mountainous interior, the type of Jamaican landscape Church depicts. Does his painting elide or reference this history? What about the painting’s barely noticeable hilltop monastery?
About landscape politics, consider Karl Marx’s quip in Das Kapital on places like the Lake District: “The laborers are first driven from the land, then come the sheep.” Agriculture’s industrialization pushes working people from the countryside to the city. Was the Lake District’s empty quietude partly the flipside of London’s crowded noisiness?
With photos of Yosemite Valley, the exhibit reminds visitors of the terra nullius logic implicit in the United States’s westward expansion across North America (“Manifest Destiny”).
And, by assuming human interventions alone count as marking the Earth, the terra nullius notion is anthropocentric. What about beaver dams, not to mention plants marking their presence on Earth via the atmosphere’s high oxygen level?
Storm Cloud asks visitors to consider how, both in Britain and the US, colonialism, slavery, and capital’s exploitation of labor and land were inseparable from industrialization and so from the carbon dioxide level shooting up in the atmosphere.
In the exhibit’s next to last room panoramic photos show some of the hundreds of oil derricks that spread across Los Angeles in the early twentieth century. Carbon dioxide from burning the fossil fuel those wells provided lingers still in Earth’s atmosphere and will continue to do so for centuries.
The last room: across from a bench, on the far wall a wide screen plays on loop a video of sky and clouds filmed from a Los Angeles rooftop over several days. This is Rebeca Méndez’s Any-Instant-Whatever, here a callback to the Ruskin cloud images projected in the exhibit’s first room.
Storm Cloud includes red (as in “red alert”) wall placards titled “Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the Atmosphere” and explaining how labels adjacent select works in the exhibit note the atmospheric carbon dioxide level the year a given work was produced.
These levels increase as the works get more recent. With 2020’s Any-Instant-Whatever, the level was 417 parts per million (ppm) of CO2, far above the “safe” level of 350 ppm. With English painter John Constable’s 1822 View on the Stour near Dedham, the level was 284 ppm.
No single work in Storm Cloud alone fully makes the leap from an ecological awareness of local pollution to a climatological awareness of our planetary-scale ecological emergency. However, what about these works taken collectively, along with the guiding scientific data? As a hybrid work both artistic and scientific, the exhibition itself prompts the leap.
In the last room, there is no writing on the wall. The room invites visitors to sit on the bench and meditate on the exhibit while watching Any-Instant-Whatever’s beautiful range of colors, blues, whites, and grays, some purples, moving and still, still and moving.
Storm Cloud offers visitors a unique experience that is both pleasurable and instructive. The exhibit brings the importance to our present of a recent past (1780 to 1930) into clear focus.
And don’t forget: the first Thursday of every month, admission to the Huntington is free of charge with an advance reservation.
