The New Aesthetics of Climate Change
Mondays,6–7:30 PM | $50/$20 per class | Members $35/$15

At a moment when extreme climate change is transforming our world, how do artists, filmmakers and activists portray the environment in ways that question routine assumptions?

In each of the three talks in this series, writer and scholar Lisa E. Bloom brings art into conversation with the climate crisis. Connecting research from her forthcoming book Critical Polar Aesthetics: Art and the Climate Crisis in the Arctic and Antarctic with the strategies of science fiction, speculative fiction, epic, comedy and tragedy, this class considers how aesthetics and the imagination can be used to orient us toward a more just and resilient world. Over three weeks, Bloom will bring together issues too often kept separate from conversations about science and climate change - gender, sexuality, race, postcolonial relations, and even art history - and presents a compelling narrative about the interdependency of the human and the non-human, the resilience and resistance of indigenous communities, and the pervasiveness of resurgent nationalisms and globalizing capitalism.

November 30| Art of Antarctica in the Time of Climate Change
December 7 | View from the Future: Women Artists, Writers, and Filmmakers Turn to Science Fiction to Write A Message about our World
December 14 | Film and Indigenous Perspectives on the Environment

Important Note: To help accommodate diverse schedules, individual class sessions will be recorded and made available to class participants for a week after each class takes place.

Visit community.pafa.org/join to become a member today! For more information contact our Membership Office at 215-972-2077.

  1. Step 1 Selection
  2. Step 2 Registration
Monday November 30
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
PAFA's Art History and Appreciation series is designed to increase the public's knowledge and appreciation of the visual arts through a series of lectures around a specific topic. Sign up for all three classes by clicking this option.
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Price
$50.00
 
$35.00
 
Monday November 30
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
British literature has been a key cultural resource in the West for understanding the sublime in relation to nature and the Polar Regions. These texts will serve as the initial frame for investigating how women artists, in new and imaginative ways, often draw from and rethink those traditions to represent the effects of climate change in their art and writing.
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$20.00
 
$15.00
 
Monday December 7
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Why do writers and filmmakers turn to the genre of science fiction to question routine assumptions about the natural world and its future development? The lecture will compare a short science-fiction style text written by well-known science studies scholars, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, titled The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014) with a short science fiction film directed by Naomi Klein titled A Message from the Future (2019).
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$20.00
 
$15.00
 
Monday December 14
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
What does it mean to make art about a warming Arctic without sentimentalizing or spectacularizing suffering? Indigenous literary theorist Gerald Vizenor uses the term “aesthetics of survivance” to articulate the central place of creative visual story-telling in indigenous knowledge to address climate trauma. Bloom will build on this tenet by investigating films about the Arctic that call forth new forms of representation and narrative on the climate crisis by pushing the viewer to imagine a different way of seeing, feeling, knowing and surviving in the face of a fast-changing landscape.
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$15.00
 
$20.00
 
Make an additional donation $  
Event registration summary
The New Aesthetics of Climate Change:
General Admission
0
$50.00
PAFA Members
0
$35.00
Class 1: Art of Antarctica in the Time of Climate Change:
General Admission
0
$20.00
PAFA Member
0
$15.00
Class 2:View from the Future: Women Artists, Writers and Filmmakers Turn to Science Fiction:
General Admission
0
$20.00
PAFA Member
0
$15.00
Class 3: Film and Indigenous Perspectives on the Environment:
PAFA Member
0
$15.00
General Admission
0
$20.00
Donation:
$0.00
Total:
$
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