Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic

A Talk by Lisa Bloom

In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom examines feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures. Bloom’s examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.

Lisa E. Bloom is the author of many femi- nist books and articles in art history, visual culture, and cultural studies including Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (University of Minnesota Press), With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press) and Jewish Identities in U.S. Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity (Routledge). She has taught and had been a researcher at numerous universities and art schools over the years including the University of California, Berkeley, (2018-2024) where she was recently a scholar-in-residence at the Beatrice Bain Center in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.