Map at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Map is on the left and the PMA’s visitor map is on the right.
Exhibition view
Map (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Part of series Climate Crisis: The Inherent Exhibition (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
2023
Digital print
8.5in x 5.75in
Map is an 18-page self-guided tour booklet for the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). It traces the origins of the climate crisis through works in the PMA collections. The booklet is a replica of the PMA’s visitor map in material and design. Each page contains an image of an artwork and a description of that artwork’s relationship to the history of the climate crisis. The content of the brochure is based on information publicly available in the PMA’s online collections, and academic histories of energy, industrialization, and art.
The booklet marks points in a narrative of emissions and exploitation, transforming paintings and decorative arts into documentation of how wealth was built through extraction over time. Map is a proposal for museum interpretation in the present and future of the unfolding crisis. The work is prefigurative not of revolution but of a mainstreaming of climate crisis history as a backdrop for cultural interpretation.
Map was distributed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on a Free Saturday in the summer of 2023 without the museum’s invitation, and exhibited at Atelier Gallery for the UPenn MFA Thesis show AWAY FROM CENTER in the spring of 2023.