Honoring the Future’s Climate Art & Action exhibition opened to enthusiastic reviews at the Audubon Naturalist Society’s (ANS’s) Woodend Nature Sanctuary in Chevy Chase, Maryland on March 1, 2019.
ANS Executive Director Lisa Alexander welcomes guests to the opening of the Climate Art & Action exhibition at ANS’s Woodend Sanctuary.
Lisa Alexander, ANS’s Executive Director, welcomed over 90 guests to the exhibition, which features artwork by 10 pioneering artists motivated by concern over climate change. Their art reveals how climate change will impact the metropolitan area and explores what individuals and communities can do to respond.
The opening reception also included showings of Let’s Explore, Honoring the Future’s 360° film on climate change, and a hands-on energy efficiency demonstration by high school volunteers in ANS’s P.O.W.E.R. (Peer Outreach With Energy Resources) program.
Exhibition visitors learn energy efficiency tips from high school volunteers in ANS’s P.O.W.E.R. (Peer Outreach With Energy Resources) program.
“This exhibition is a sampler,” Fran Dubrowski, Director of Honoring the Future, told attendees. “It uses photography to bring together in a mid-sized gallery setting artworks from many different artists, in varied media, employing very diverse spatial dimensions – some quite massive. For example, Nancy Cohen’s Hackensack Dreaming is a 2-walled installation: one wall is 20 x 11 x 35 ft. long, another 17 x 11 x 9 feet. Patricia Johanson’s eco-art Fair Park Lagoon occupies about 5 city blocks in Dallas.”
“Collectively,” she noted, “these themes weave a story that becomes more powerful than any single work alone. That, by itself, is a metaphor for how we need to address climate change – together, using everyone’s talents.”
Both speakers also introduced guests to the work of the Audubon Naturalist Society (ANS). The Washington, DC region’s oldest independent environmental organization, ANS links conservation activities with educational programming, reaching more than 9,000 children annually through popular nature preschool, school, family, scout, and camp programs.
ANS also offers adults a rich variety of natural history classes, local outings, and national and international travel experiences. Participants learn how to address climate change through energy efficiency, transportation initiatives, storm water management, and watershed and rural lands protection. And ANS’s “nature for all” focus welcomes all of the metropolitan area’s diverse communities – e.g., through bilingual signage throughout the Sanctuary (and at this art exhibition).
The reception kicked off a series of events designed to step up ANS’s commitment to the arts. The current exhibition, which is free and open to the public, continues through March 15, 2019. Gallery hours are 10:00 am to 5:00 pm (Mondays through Saturdays) and 12 noon to 5:00 pm (Sundays). No registration is required to view the exhibition. At selected gallery hours, volunteers will be on hand to assist viewers in using virtual reality headsets to view the film.
The ANS Woodend Sanctuary is located at 8940 Jones Mill Road, Chevy Chase, MD 20815. For more information, contact ANS at contact@anshome.org or by phone at (301) 652-9188.
