Alina Tugend

The handprint very likely belonged to one of the many enslaved craftsmen who helped bring to life so many of Jefferson’s designs, said Erik H. Neil, director of the museum. While it might not have been included in such a show in the past, now items that prominently display, rather than hide, the reality of slave labor play an important role.

The exhibition at the Chrysler Museum, in Norfolk, Virginia, is one example of how some museums are working to incorporate the impact of slavery in exhibitions and permanent collections in a way not commonly done even a decade ago.

The Chrysler Museum exhibition “Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models, Democratic Principles and the Conflict of Ideals” — which runs through Jan. 19 — follows Jefferson’s evolution as an architect through 120 objects, including models, paintings, drawings, photographs and architectural elements — as well as bricks, nails and other items linked to enslaved laborers and craftsmen.

The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Palladio Museum in Vicenza, Italy, which put on a show in 2015 about Jefferson and his relationship with the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.

While the Chrysler Museum is using a number of models from the Italian exhibit, “I knew for our audiences, we would have to tell a fuller story,” Neil said. “From the start, we knew there would be a component that would focus on enslaved craftsmen,” who built Jefferson’s home, Monticello, the Capitol Building in Richmond, the University of Virginia and other endeavors that Jefferson either designed or influenced.

But it wasn’t always easy to find information on those largely anonymous enslaved workers.

“With Jefferson, we have thousands of letters, and reams of paper have been spilled about him as a person; in many cases, we barely know the names of the people who were building and designing or interpreting his designs,” Neil said.

But the identity of some were discovered. One of the objects in the show is a paneled door from Poplar Forest, in Bedford County, Virginia, a plantation that was Jefferson’s second retreat.

Microscopic examination by architectural historians at Poplar Forest found that tools used to help shape the door belonged to John Hemmings, an enslaved craftsman who also worked at Monticello. He was part of the large Hemmings family connected to Jefferson; Sally Hemmings fathered at least six of his children.

The show also includes a photograph of Isaac Granger, also known as Isaac Jefferson, who was an enslaved metalsmith, later freed. He is wearing a blacksmith apron over an open-neck collared shirt, leaning on a table and staring straight at the camera.

“It’s a fascinating object because in so many photographs of enslaved people, they have no choice over how they’re portrayed — they’re part of the landscape,” Neil said. “It’s much more rare that this man — he was free at the time — could go into a studio and represent himself as a skilled craftsman.”

Other museums are also grappling with how they can rework or revise their collections, even in small ways, to acknowledge the role of slavery in the art itself or people represented by the art.

“People have been doing research about these issues of slavery for a long time, in deep, critical ways in art and art history,” said La Tanya S. Autry, a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Delaware and a fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland.

“The knowledge has been out there, but there’s been more resistance to incorporating it into the museum field,” she added. “It’s interesting to see in the last several years, there’s been more effort or more openness to actually start questioning things, such as wall labels and thinking about how we show objects.” Autry is known for her work on how museums approach race.

At the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Athens, a former assistant curator for the museum, had long noted that the portraits in the museum’s American Paintings Galleries showed only white faces.

After the 2016 presidential election, she felt compelled to act. “The charged rhetoric — it was so violent,” she said of the presidential campaign. “This idea, of making America great seemed to be about erasing people of color from American history. And with the way we have galleries installed, we were unintentionally reinforcing this idea — and it’s false. We need to address this.”

But, she said, “everything we came up with seemed too difficult to implement and wouldn’t come across clearly.” Then a relatively simple, but powerful idea was suggested — change or add to existing wall labels to identify people who were slave traders or owners.

And it turned out there was already a fair amount of information in the museum’s files.

The museum hung additional labels on top of the traditional ones for 10 out of 29 portraits; for example, one for a portrait of a Capt.-Lt. James Larrabee notes that the compensation for his military duties included “his living expenses and a slave named York, who was freed upon Larrabee’s death in 1762.” Another, of an Ann Gibbes, states that her father owned a plantation along with 68 slaves.

In addition, a larger sign in the gallery says in part: “Many of the people represented here derived their wealth and social status from the system of violence and oppression. This tragic history has been overlooked in our galleries.”

At the Harvard Art Museums, a similar effort has taken place this year for a handful of paintings, including 18th-century portraits of the Boylston family, who were Boston aristocrats. One painting of Nicholas Boylston shows a ship in the background; his arm rests on a ledger “signifying wealth that came from trans-Atlantic trade,” said Soyoung Lee, the museums’ chief curator.

“Part of that wealth and social status came from trading in luxury goods, but also enslaved people from Africa,” Lee said. “This indisputable fact was not really incorporated into the story about the Boylston family, but because the painting itself has these visual clues that tell about the family business, we thought it was important to include that story.” The wall label was rewritten, “adding a more complex layer,” she said.

For Autry, the fact that museum administrators outside of African American museums are talking about this, she said, is a sign of change.

And, she added, so are programs that teach and train future museum curators. “A lot of institutions are incorporating this other approach to history and trying to focus on things that have been obscured and excluded in the past — and ways that people have challenged that.”

This article originally appeared in

Displaying, not Hiding, the Reality of Slave Labor in Art

One of the plainest, yet also most poignant items at the Chrysler Museum of Art’s exhibition highlighting Thomas Jefferson as an architect is a worn, reddish-brown brick with a handprint.

“I chose an HBCU because I felt safe — especially now during the Trump presidency, it’s scary to go out in a world where you feel less than human and people close to my age are being murdered for the color of their skin,” said Jourdan Clark, 22, a senior at Dillard University, a historically black college in New Orleans.

Faith Wykle, 19, said the presidential election and its aftermath also played a role in why she chose Smith College, a women’s college in Massachusetts, even though she had assumed she would go to a coed institution.

“When I applied to college it was 2016, and the election stuff was heating up,” she said. “What that showed me was the massive issues our country still faces with sexism and bias. It cast a light on things. I felt like this was a place I could be challenged but also grow.”

Nationwide, there are 102 active historically black public and private colleges and universities, known as HBCUs — institutions established before 1964 to educate black students who were often barred from white schools. About 10 percent of African-American college students attend an HBCU.

According to national education figures, from 2014 to 2017, the number of first-year students who enrolled increased to 41,000 from about 36,000, and applications have jumped about 20 percent, said Andrés Castro Samayoa, an assistant professor of higher education at Boston College. More white and Hispanic students are also attending HBCUs. And this at a time of declining college enrollment overall.

And despite some hard years for many women’s colleges — only 38 exist, compared with 64 in 2000, according to the Women’s College Coalition — applications and enrollment are also up overall. Enrollment of first-year students jumped to almost 13,000 in 2017, from 9,000 in 2014, according to its figures.

At Smith College, the difference now, said Audrey Smith, vice president for enrollment, “is that more applicants are embracing the fact it’s a women’s college, rather than falling in love with Smith and then applying to it in spite of it being a women’s college.”

There are numerous reasons students choose a historically black or women’s college — many offer first-rate academics, small classes and easy access to professors. In addition, tuition at HBCUs has traditionally been lower than at other institutions. But few doubt that recent interest is related to the current political climate.

Marybeth Gasman, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying HBCUs for decades. She estimates that until three years ago, she would receive about eight phone calls and emails yearly from students and parents asking about such colleges, with questions typically related to academics and whether it would hurt a student’s future choices to choose an HBCU.

“In the past three years I’ve received between 80 and 100 a year,” she said. “Nearly all those phone calls or emails or Facebook messages ask one question: ‘Do you think it would be better for my child to go to an HBCU in the current political climate?’ Students ask, ‘Do you think I will be safer at an HBCU?’ To me, this has really been powerful.”

The growing interest in historically black and women’s colleges plays into the debate about campus “safe spaces” — which some see as a way for students to feel both emotionally and physically secure, and others view as a way to cater to a generation of snowflakes who melt under the slightest disagreement or negativity.

Research from the Gallup organization shows that graduates of HBCUs tend to report better college experiences than African-American students at mostly white colleges and are almost twice as likely to agree that their university prepared them well for life outside of college. And other research found that women’s institutions — more so than coed ones — have created a climate “where women are encouraged to realize their potential and to become involved in various facets of campus life, inside and outside the classroom.”

A common criticism, which students can hear from family, friends and counselors, is that they are choosing to attend a place that doesn’t reflect “the real world.”

“That’s a dangerous misconception,” said Wykle, a sophomore at Smith. She acknowledged the belief among some that women choose a single-sex school because “they hate men, they don’t want to be with them, and they want to escape.

“That wasn’t my thought process at all,” she said. “Choosing a women’s college wasn’t about escape — college is a time to figure out who you are. I didn’t want to be missing out on things because of my gender or being put down in class because of my gender. It’s hard to be a positive and confident woman when people are saying you’re loud or bossy or too opinionated.”

And few colleges are actually as segregated as they may appear to outsiders — women’s colleges usually have partnerships with coed universities, and black colleges can be more diverse than predominantly white institutions.

“A black student at an HBCU will have a much better chance of having a white professor than a white student at a predominantly white institution will have of having a black professor,” said Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard.

Not everyone ascribes the growing interest to the political environment. At two of the top HBCUs in the country, Howard University in Washington and Spelman College in Atlanta, the presidents said that while national events might play a role, it was academic excellence that attracted students.

“I hesitate to attribute the change to the political environment in Washington,” said Mary Schmidt Campbell, president of Spelman, one of two all-women HBCUs. “I honestly believe the reason our application numbers have gone up is that the college has done a better job telling the Spelman story. Everything on this campus is designed to contribute to the success of the black women who enroll here.”

Leocadia Zak, president of Agnes Scott, a women’s college in Decatur, Georgia, credits her college’s growth — last year it had its largest incoming class in history — to the establishment of its Summit curriculum, which is focused on leadership and global learning; among other things, it requires every first-year student to journey abroad for a week and take classes on leadership throughout their four years.

But David Wilson, president of Morgan State University, an HBCU in Baltimore, where the digital sign in front of the school sometimes reads, “Morgan State University: Where Black Lives Have Always Mattered,” has no doubt that the 2016 election, the shooting of unarmed black men by the police and numerous racial attacks in the past several years have drawn many students to his university. Last year, it had the largest freshman class in almost two decades, he said.

“Many of them, particularly those who grew up in suburbia, had very few black teachers and were sometimes the only black student in class,” Wilson said of the new students. “If you overlay that with the national climate, they wanted places like Morgan, where they could be truly valued and respected. They can also learn about themselves and their history in a way they did not in high school.”

Leah Erby, 20, a Dillard junior from Chicago, agreed. She went to a mostly white Catholic high school after attending elementary and middle school with primarily black students.

“Going to that high school made me realize blacks and white are not equal — I wasn’t oblivious before, but here it was in my face,” she said.

Kimbrough of Dillard has called the trend “the Missouri effect,” referring to student protests in 2015 regarding racist incidents at the University of Missouri that led to the resignation of the university system president and campus chancellor.

“That was a catalyst for black students on white campuses,” he said. “Then in fall of 2016 was the presidential election, which added another layer for students that was contentious. More students were saying, ‘I’m not putting up with this — let me take a second look at HBCUs.'”

In an effort to dig beneath the anecdotes, Janelle Williams, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions, and Robert Palmer, an associate professor at Howard, have conducted surveys and interviews with 20 students at Howard and 20 at Clark Atlanta University, another HBCU, with plans to interview more.

Preliminary findings from the study, to be released in October, back up the Trump bump theory, Palmer said.

“We were shocked at how many said the racialized rhetoric of Trump led them to seek an HBCU,” Palmer said. “They wanted to be in a safe space — that was a common theme across the majority of interviews.”

Wykle, the Smith College sophomore, said she believed that attending a women’s college would make her more, not less, prepared to face life’s travails.

“You don’t leave wanting to hide away from the world,” she said. “I think you leave knowing you want to take it on. A lot of the negative stereotypes associated with women’s colleges and HBCUs come from a place of fear, because we live in a society that puts down women and people of color.

“Then you have people coming out of those colleges with a sense of who they are and the ability to stand there and say, ‘I’m not afraid — bring what you will and I will bounce back with everything I’ve got’ — and I think that scares a lot of people.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/education/learning/hbcu-womens-colleges-haven.html" id="19f7c081-5729-3a63-a137-2b0f2e6b8367">The New York Times</a>.

Seeking a Haven in HBCUs and Single-Sex Colleges

It has been called the Trump bump, the black renaissance and the Missouri effect: a noticeable increase in students applying to and enrolling in historically black colleges and universities and women’s colleges over the past several years.

It’s a new way of thinking about higher education. Not as a discrete four years of classroom learning, but stretching over the six decades or so that today’s college students are expected to work over their lifetime.

The 60-year curriculum, which is more an evolving model than a concrete program, is primarily taking shape in the continuing education arm of universities, with the goal of developing a higher education model that is much more nimble. It needs to respond quickly to the reality that employees now change jobs and careers many times and that rapidly evolving industries require them to continually learn new skills.

“The real driver of the 60-year curriculum is the job market and length of life,” said Huntington D. Lambert, the dean of the division of continuing education and university extension at Harvard University, who is a leader in the movement.

The employee of the future, he added, “typically will have a new job every five years, probably for 60 to 80 years, and probably every one of those will require skills you did not learn in college.”

While the 60-year curriculum may sound like a new name for lifelong learning, the difference is that it focuses on how an institution can provide formal education courses and programs, said Gary Matkin, dean of the Division of Continuing Education and vice provost of the Division of Career Pathways at the University of California at Irvine.

“The 60-year curriculum is really the organizing principle behind a lot of different trends in higher education, including the trend of being more accountable and very relevant to the work force needs of a particular region,” said Matkin, who is credited with coining the phrase. “It’s not just inward looking, in terms of students, but also outward looking in how the university can really help the community.”

In general, some or all of these elements are part of the 60-year model: Micro-credentials or badges, which are mini-degrees in specific competency areas; portable transcripts, degrees and credentials that move with the student rather than stay with the institution; a variety of ways for students to attend classes — in person, via video calls or online; more connections between continuing education and a university’s undergraduate and graduate programs; and greater support over the long haul through advisers, financial aid and career services.

It also includes more short courses that emphasize job skills — both hard skills, such as a new computer language or technology, and soft skills, such as learning how to engage in difficult conversations — using real-life problems and case studies.

Since the courses, for the most part, are open to all, don’t require a long-term commitment and cost far less per credit than a typical graduate degree, they are more accessible to a wider range of learners.

“Everyone has a slightly different view of what this is,” said Christopher Dede, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “The goal is to make this a thoughtful evolution rather than doing it piecemeal.”

While there is no written curriculum, a few universities — including UC Irvine, Harvard and the University of Washington — are at the cutting edge of the concept. A book coedited by Dede, “The 60-year Curriculum: New Models for Lifelong Learning in the Digital Economy,” that developed out of two Harvard conferences on the subject, is expected to be published next year.

Many continuing education programs already offer some of the elements. For example, the University of Washington Continuum College, which is the continuing education and professional development division of the University of Washington in Seattle, offers 99 certificate programs — most noncredit — as well as 111 graduate degree programs.

An entire certificate course, which can take up to nine months part time to complete, runs between $3,600 and $4,500, said Rovy Branon, the college’s vice provost. Even with the low fees, some students need financial aid, so “we’ve started our own noncredit scholarship fund,” Branon said, which is unusual in the continuing education world.

The number of certificate students has increased by 31% since 2016, he said.

One thing that almost everyone agrees is needed is more guidance, a theme that stood out in interviews with Harvard’s continuing education students, Dede said. As their careers progress, “they’re looking for a kind of sustained coaching that isn’t necessarily tied to a particular institution, but someone who understands the whole map of potential support services that they might need.” Or as Branon termed it, a learning concierge.

Since much of the 60-year curriculum is focused on working life, it makes sense to incorporate career services; Matkin’s role as dean of both continuing education and career services at UC Irvine is unusual but emblematic of what the model needs to offer.

“We might be the only campus in the world that’s doing that,” he said. “But it’s also a natural, because both units are concerned about students after they graduate. It really makes a lot of sense to put the two together.”

The move has both elevated the stature and visibility of career services and allowed students in continuing education to have access to it, Matkin said.

Not all the changes are going on in continuing education. Last year, the Georgia Institute of Technology published a report two years in the making — “Deliberate Innovation, Lifelong Education” — to serve as a road map of what higher education at Georgia Tech will look like in 20 years, said Rafael L. Bras, the university’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.

Georgia Tech and higher education in general, “will have to consider the possibility that students will come in and out of periods of intensive study. The undergraduate of the future — or the graduate — may spend two years, and then go off to do their startup and then come back.

“It’s a major change and, honestly, none of us are quite ready to do it yet,” Bras said. “But we need to start getting ready.”

Nor is the 60-year curriculum limited to the United States. The University of Newcastle at Sydney, in Australia, now offers about 150 short courses, most just one or two days long, which people can attend in person or join via a video call.

Ann Brewer, dean of the university, calls them “just in time” classes; the subjects including leadership, conflict management and coaching, with an emphasis on career and critical thinking skill development.

They began three years ago, and now 2,000 students attend — the average age is 35 to 50 years — with intake tripling each year, she said. The short courses are mostly noncredit, but a future goal is that those taking them can eventually have them count toward a degree.

But “we’re finding more and more people don’t want to do a full degree,” said Brewer, who has long researched professional continuing education. “First of all, they haven’t got the money and increasingly employers are focusing on capability and competence rather than qualifications.”

The university is also working on the concept of an e-learning passport, where all of a student’s degrees and credentials will be easy to see, like stamps on a passport.

The 60-year curriculum will require both individuals and institutions to relearn longstanding culture, habits and ways of thinking, Dede said. And that’s not easy.

Faculty and administrators can be concerned about the potential of additional workloads, whether class quality will be watered down and the financial impact to the school if students choose to do a certification program rather than go for a degree, Brewer said.

A lot of questions remain unresolved, but one fact is not in dispute: “Higher education is being disrupted,” she said, adding, “I believe that in the future, it will look much more like what we’re talking about than what it looks like now.”

The 60-year curriculum.

60 Years of Higher Ed -- Really?

It’s not just the subject of passionate political debate.

It’s at the heart of a growing number of museum exhibitions this year, including the works of old masters and exhibits built with high-tech innovations, designed to inspire artistic appreciation and a desire to respond to environmental challenges.

Among the shows: The much-anticipated “Hudson Rising” at the New-York Historical Society; “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment,” in Salem, Massachusetts, which looks at 300 years of American art through an environmental lens; “Documenting Change: Our Climate (Past, Present and Future)” in Boulder, Colorado. And more.

“There’s a crescendo of interest in both art that is itself about the environment and art that is self-consciously environmental, and I think that’s entirely understandable and good, because it draws attention to these dire situations we’re facing,” said Karl Kusserow, curator of American Art at the Princeton University Art Museum.

Kusserow is a co-curator of “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment,” which includes paintings, artifacts, sculpture, prints, photographs and decorative art. It started at the Princeton University Art Museum and is now showing at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem until May 5. It will end at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, from May 25 to Sept. 9.

“The impetus grew out of my concern for climate change, and my recognition and realization that I could bridge my concerns as a citizen with my work as a scholar,” said Kusserow, who spent seven years developing the show with Alan Braddock, associate professor of Art History and American Studies at the College of William &amp; Mary.

The goal of the exhibition, he said, is to view famous and lesser-known art through ecological glasses: how the environment is represented in images and how humans’ place in the world is depicted.

“It asks people to think in new ways about iconic works,” Kusserow said. For example, the famous 19th-century painting by Albert Bierstadt, “Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite” — a lush painting of one of the national park’s waterfalls — is hung alongside a work by artist Valerie Hegarty from 2007, “Fallen Bierstadt,” which shows the same painting askew, burned and ripped.

“Bierstadt presents a certain way of understanding nature as beautiful and unpeopled and full of animals and grain and enduring and static, and Hegarty takes that same image and literally dematerializes it,” he said.

Another painting — “Prisoners From the Front,” by Winslow Homer — is an image traditionally interpreted as a confrontation between a Union officer and Confederate soldiers. But the surrounding landscape looks barren, and the show focuses on the environmental effects of the Civil War on the land, which included deforestation and the burning of crops. It was a strategy of the North and South and “it really had dire environmental consequences,” Kusserow said.

The New-York Historical Society’s major spring show, “Hudson Rising” (through Aug. 4), intertwines famed works of art, as well as aquariums, political leaflets, music and videos.

The show offers one of the most comprehensive exhibits ever on the Hudson River, with the goal of not simply looking at ecological changes, but understanding how the river “became an incubator for environmental activism,” said Marci Reaven, the museum’s vice president for history exhibitions.

The exhibition proceeds chronologically and geographically from the 1800s and the building of the Erie Canal through today. It displays the beauty of the Hudson through the museum’s extensive collection of Hudson River School paintings, as well as photographs and tourist memorabilia, such as posters from the 1930s encouraging people to take a day trip on the river. But it also shows the toll that tourism and industry have taken.

“All of its uses and passions come into conflict with each other,” Reaven said. “There is a growing awareness the region may not be able to be all things to all people.”

The show highlights activism over the years to save the Hudson.

In the early 20th century, organizations such as women’s clubs and preservationist societies protested the rock blasting of the Palisades cliffs overlooking the river from New Jersey and helped create Palisades Amusement Park, which became one of the most visited in the country.

In the 1960s and 1970s activists fought, and ultimately defeated, a plan by Con Edison to build a plant on Storm King Mountain on the river’s west bank in New York. Visitors to the exhibition can see a yellow political button with the slogan, “Dig they won’t ... Save the Hudson,” and hear folk singer Pete Seeger’s song “My Dirty Stream,” a mournful ode to the polluted river.

The end of the exhibition will be a look toward the future and how to reclaim the Hudson River in response to climate change, showcasing projects already underway, such as reeflike structures, known as “living breakwaters,” that can decrease the impact of waves, and help restore the shoreline.

“The idea is to look at what has been resolved and what are the new challenges,” Reaven said. “What is the river teaching us, how will climate change unfold in the region and how are people preparing?”

The University of Colorado Art Museum, using resources at its doorsteps, is showing “Documenting Change: Our Climate (Past, Present and Future), until July 20. It encompasses 70 works of art by 30 artists.

It includes pieces by Tali Weinberg, who incorporates climate change data and drought data into the textiles she weaves, and a four-hour video by Peggy Weil, “88 Cores,” which connects images from 88 ice cores from the nearby National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility.

The Climate Museum in New York City will hold an exhibition at its temporary home on Governors Island from May 4 through Oct. 31. The museum last year installed 10 solar powered traffic signs that looked like digital highway messages, but issued warnings such as “Climate Change at Work.”

From March 16 through June 14, the museum, in partnership with the New York City Department of Education Office of Sustainability, will present “Climate Speaks,” a training program and competition focused on spoken word and poetry related to climate change and social justice. The finalists will appear at the Apollo Theater in Harlem on June 14.

The theme of the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial is “Nature,” from May 10 to Jan. 20, 2020. It will include 62 projects focused on how designers and artists are collaborating with scientists, engineers, environmentalists and others to “find potential solutions — to make steps to save our planet,” said Caroline Baumann, director of the museum. “And I include the ‘make steps’ because some of these are speculative — they are provoking the viewer.”

The show will run simultaneously at the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York and at the Cube design museum in Kerkrade, the Netherlands, a first for the Cooper Hewitt, Baumann said.

The show will include a “smell series” by artist Christina Agapakis, designer Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and olfactory artist Sissel Tolaas that recreates the aromas of extinct flowers through DNA drawn from specimens preserved at the Harvard University Herbaria. There will also be an organic cotton burial suit by designer Jae Rhim Lee, which contains biodegradable materials that also break down toxins in the human body.

And outdoors will be “Tree of 40 Fruit” by artist Sam Van Aken — a real tree that has apples, pears, plums, peaches, cherries and apricots grafted on it using century-old methods to preserve rare fruit.

Although very different, the exhibitions have one thing in common: using a mixture of chronology, geography, materials, ideas and collaborators to express something that can at times seem indescribable.

“We’ve got a tremendous desire on the part of scientists to engage with different audiences and a desire on the part of humanists and artists to grapple with the immensity of the problems we’re facing right now,” said Erin Espelie, co-director of the Nature, Environment, Science &amp; Technology Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado. One way to do that, she added, is through the art museum “bringing people together outside political affiliation and into a different environment that allows for more empathy.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/art-climate-change.html" id="6ad294e1-982d-363a-a4dc-0ff49f669d3b">The New York Times</a>.

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Can Art Help Save the Planet?

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Alina Tugend

Articles written by the author

Displaying, not Hiding, the Reality of Slave Labor in Art

Seeking a Haven in HBCUs and Single-Sex Colleges

60 Years of Higher Ed -- Really?

Can Art Help Save the Planet?