From September 14th 2024- January 6th 2025, The Huntington will be hosting an exhibition titled “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis,” which is just one moving part in The Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative. It seeks to contextualize the modern-day environmental crisis, with emphasis on history and the intense effect of the industrialized and globalized economy on the world as we know it. These shifts have been observed by not only the everyday 19th-century citizen, but by the era’s writers, scientists, academics, and artists especially. The Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites, and members of the Arts and Crafts movement are all present in this reactive and expressive project. From now until the 6th of January, “Storm Cloud” will be displayed in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery. With around 200 items, the work is abundant in visuals of scientific illustrations, photographs, textiles, drawings, manuscripts, books, and other rare and coveted items. 

The exhibition also highlights valuable items loaned from museums throughout Britain and The United States, highlighting profound takes on these two historical and artistic empires. Tying the themes of the works together is an upcoming book plentiful in renderings of environmental changes. This publication will also be titled,  “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis.” This title as a throughline for the multifaceted project is an homage to the lecture series, “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” by British writer and art critic, John Ruskin. In it, Ruskin contemplates the absoluteness and the calamity of the ever-changing English sky, and its sad wist in hues of coal-fired grey. 

These sentiments are brought forth with a contemporary perspective by five key artists: Binh Danh, Rebeca Méndez, Jamilah Sabur, Leah Sobsey, and Will Wilson. Together, they confront topics like the plantation system, erosion and biodiversity loss, deforestation, drought, slavery, factory labor, etc. Moreover, they weave in stories of the effects this has on sociology and the potential for the liveliness of earth’s people. McCurdy famously notes, “the story of the environment cannot be separated from the human condition.” The exhibition is a stirring act of humanity, activism, art, and ache. To wrap up the experience, there is a screening of Any-Instant-Whatever (2020), a video by Los Angeles–based artist, Méndez. This work was recorded atop a Los Angeles roof and appears in a 90-minute loop, 2-channel video projection with sound. Filmed in a singular January day, bringing attention to the constancy and transience of clouds, their forms, and their inferences. From rain to clean air, Méndez showcases environmental themes in such a way that there is clear parallel to human activity. As a metaphor and as a physical formation, clouds reign in their unique ability to reflect and ingest the condition of human behavior. The critique of this is therein, interpretive and implicit.