Art, Ecology, and Climate: Power and Energy

One of several e-museums devoted to ecological and climatological topics, this e-museum highlights artworks that depict power and energy production and use. The gallery’s many twentieth-century images of factories, mills, trains, cargo ships, and automobiles show how artists have borne witness to and commented on the growth of fossil fuel use and electrical grids as industry become global, cities grew, car culture became more entrenched, and transportational infrastructure expanded. Other works in the e-museum show power and energy being produced by means whose environmental impacts have been less profound historically than systems run on coal, natural gas, petroleum products, and nuclear energy: these include animals (horses, camels, oxen), wind (windmills, sailing ships), and human physical activity (rickshaws, bicycles, sedan chairs). We invite you to think critically about how different works shape their viewers’ attitudes towards and feelings about certain forms of power and energy production and use. In what ways do individual works seem celebratory, fascinated, cautionary, elegiac, nostalgic, horrified, or hopeful?

More power and energy-related works can be found throughout the Art, Ecology, and Climate E-Museums, including “The Anthropocene,” “Environmental Justice,” “Extraction,” “Food Systems,” and “Pollution and Contamination.”