Nuclear disasters. Acid rain. The mass extinction of animal and plant species. The ecological crises that the planet faces today have fundamentally transformed the way we perceive human interaction with the natural environment. What can art, architecture, design, and performance practices offer to current debates on climate change and environmental justice? Curated by students in UC Berkeley Professor Sugata Ray’s Fall 2023 College of Letters & Science First-Year Pathways course Art and Climate Change, this Five Tables presentation highlights artworks in the BAMPFA collection that reflect, mediate, and delve into the interconnected ecologies of life.

From early modern landscapes to colonial photography, contemporary art to eco-activism, the presentation moves across space and time to explore both decolonial histories and radical futures that are attentive to Indigenous epistemologies, interspecies friendships, the desires of nonhuman life forms, and other minor ways of being in alterity that have been marginalized by colonialism, capitalism, and the economies of natural resource extraction.