The Best Art About Climate Change: How Artists Create Beauty From Global Warming

While some climate activists destroy art, others create it. These artists take the Earth as their inspiration, but specifically, a dying Earth. It sounds sad, but multimedia renditions of melting glaciers and old computer pieces can be beautiful, and more importantly, serve as a call to action to save what natural beauty the Earth has left.

Here is a collection of some of the best art about climate change, by artists from Banksy to Patricia Carr Morgan.

From one side of the wall, you are easily fooled that this is a child enjoying the snow. However, with just a glance around the corner, you will see that the snow is not actually snow, but ashes flying into the sky from a burning dumpster. According to Grist, Banksy painted this piece in Port Talbot, known as one of the most polluted places in the U.K.

The Tempestry Project is a fiber art exhibition, reflecting the change in global temperature. The work was a collaboration between many artists. The Tempestry Project is not just one exhibit, but it is an ongoing project, made to inspire communities and people by taking something like climate change, and “..scale this down into something accurate, tangible, relatable, and beautiful,” per The Tempestry Project.

Artist Nor Tijan Firdaus makes three-dimensional art pieces using a medium that most people don’t explore: electronic waste. For her piece "Climate Change is real II," she made the face of a woman out of old computer parts such as keyboards, transistors, and inductors.

In this mural, a child sits on the ground while planting a seedling and holding an Extinction Rebellion sign, a global non-partisan movement made to push governments to act on climate change. This piece was found near Hyde Park in London, where Extinction Rebellion protests had taken place. These along with several other murals of Banksy’s specifically feature children, which makes the point of how the future looks for these younger generations, per Grist.

Rebecca Lee Kuntz makes multi-media art by the connection between humans and ecology. She created the Tree of Life Studio in 2007, and as a descendant of the Cherokee tribe and member of the Cherokee Nation in Tulsa, Okla., she taps into Cherokee mythology and folk stories of creation when creating her work.

Patricia Carr Morgan is a multimedia artist who uses photographs, carbon pigments, and coal to depict loss from a changing climate. Her series “I love you don’t leave me,” depicts photos of glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland. According to an interview with Atmos Magazine, to Morgan, glaciers are “the genesis of many losses.”

Zaria Forman creates hyper-realistic pastel drawings highlighting glaciers and sea level rise. Her work comes from lots of firsthand inspiration, having flown with NASA on Operation IceBridge, a mission to track and document the changes to ice in the poles from global warming.