Creativity is buried within each and every one of us. In the face of crisis is when we need to dig in a little deeper and bring this creativity to the surface — to feel it, to play with it, and to let it work it’s healing magic. Many artists from around the world have faced the rising global temperatures head first through various creative outlets. Below are seven awe-inspiring pieces that evoke more questions about every individual’s and every community’s place in the narrative of climate change.

How do you cope? How do you create?

If you are looking for inspiration to make your own climate change inspired art pieces, head over to the Resources tab to download how-to kits for climate related art projects.

This piece titled, Huna, created by Sean “Hula” Yoro attempts to bring awareness and recognition to the rapid deterioration of the Arctic and glaciers due to rising global temperatures. This public mural was incredibly impactful, but only for a short amount of time. The aim of it was to temporarily embrace the transience of art and our planet and eventually erode away. Hula’ artistic statement for this piece was, “Within a few weeks these murals will be forever gone, but for those who find them, I hope they ignite a sense of urgency, as they represent the millions of people in need of our help who are already being affected from the rising sea levels of climate change.”

A Song of Our Warming Planet, is one student’s response to the impending doom of climate change. University of Minnesota undergrad Daniel Crawford took a more nuanced approach to unpacking climate change. He veered away from data analytics and utilized his more familiar language to communicate the latest in climate science, he picked up his cello. Crawford used a method called data sonification which converted the global temperature records into a series of musical notes. Essentially, each note represents a  year, between 1880-2012, and the change in pitch represents the average global temperature. Crawford remarked that, “climate scientists have a standard toolbox to communicate their data, we’re trying to add another tool to that toolbox, another way to communicate these ideas to people who might get more out of music than maps, graphs and numbers.”

Leandro Erlich’s site-specific piece, titled Order of Importance, created a wave of havoc and urgency at a popular Miami Beach spot. The sand sculptures are weaved into the local landscape to evoke the feeling of ruins and a past life in response to global climate change. The cars are submerged into the beach showing how rising sea levels have immediate and extensive human consequences, including the continuing endangerment of coastal cities like Miami. In an article written about this piece, Elrich is credited to provide “thought-provoking work which offers a chilling look at what could be our future if we—and particularly our world leaders—don’t take the threats of climate change seriously.”

The Creative Action Network has launched a campaign calling on artists from around the world to create posters advocating for increased awareness and attention to the Green New Deal. The collection is titled Green New Deal Art and is inspired by the original WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project prints from the FDR New Deal era. Many of the posters draw on the same imagery to convey the need for attention and action during a difficult time. Watch this NowThis video to learn about the project.

Justin Brice Guariglia is a former NASA employee and now an artist and environmental activist who plays with highway signage as a means of communicating important messages about climate change. In this iteration of his work, We are the Asteroid, he draws from philosopher Timothy Morton to explore the convergence of ecological studies and object-oriented thought. The traffic signs are used to represent daily warnings to everyday people walking or driving by and act as a consistent reminder that can not be ignored. 

Ballet choreographer, Diana Movius, put together an eight part ballet performance in order to represent the melting ice and moving glaciers through dance and movement. This mixed media approach, titled Glacier, uses performance art and stark imagery to depict the process of calving, ice melting into the sea. It premiered in 2015 at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, DC.

This piece, You sing into the singing snow, by Matthew Burtner is one piece of a larger operatic production about climate change. Burtner is from Nuiqsit, Alaska, a tiny village on the northern edge in which the effects of global warming are vast and indisputable. This song is a combination of conversations between scientists, interviews with Alaskan natives and opera singers from around the world. It is his artistic vision to ground his homeland and people in it in with the greater conversation of climate change and global warming.