Looking for Tomorrow

How can looking at art help us solve the global crisis of climate change?

Looking for Tomorrow argues that spending time with art—looking slowly, with climate in mind—offers lessons indispensable to achieving a sustainable global civilization. Solving the climate crisis will require technical and political solutions, certainly. But it will also demand the remaking of some of our most basic beliefs. We cannot build a twenty-first-century society on unsustainable ideas inherited from industrial modernity.

Turning to modern art, Joshua Shannon shows how its creativity and innovation can ignite necessary transformations in our thinking. Across seven lessons, each grounded in deep engagement with a single artist, this book explores how art can help us unlearn the philosophies, myths, and fantasies that brought on our current crisis. It shows how art can now guide us toward new (and sometimes very old) ideas capable of supporting a sustainable and just civilization.

Art, Shannon argues, can be a guide toward connection, well-being, action, and balance. It can help us reconceive our world.

Joshua Shannon has worked on art and climate change with universities and museums around the world. He is Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. 

Contents

Introduction: Imagining Sustainability

1. The Strangeness of Climate Change
Grasping our contemporary condition, with sympathy and solidarity
The art of Anastasia Samoylova and others

2. Beyond the Human
Learning to stop placing people at the center of all our stories and ideas
The art of Vincent van Gogh and others

3. Suffering, Justice, Joy
Adopting strategies for resilience in difficult times
The art of Jacob Lawrence and others

4. Forgetting Nature
Relinquishing the myth that society is separate from nature
The art of Stephen Shore and others

5. Deep Time
Sensing our place in the long history of Earth
The art of Nancy Holt and others

6. The Everyday Sublime
Finding exaltation in ordinary places
The art of Vija Celmins and others

7. Trees and Fungus, or Greater Consciousness
Tuning in to the intelligence of other species
The art of Wangechi Mutu and others

Epilogue: Art, Love, and Citizenship

Art for Sustainability: A Creative Response Project
Acknowledgments
Sources and Further Reading
Index