Environmental Artists
The Harvard University Center for the Environment proudly hosts the Environmental Artist Series. Each year, an artist is invited to exhibit their work in the Center's lounge and come to campus to give a talk about their inspirations and processes to our interdisciplinary community. Each artist's perspective shares a different lens in creatively capturing and confronting environmental themes. Visit the HUCE lounge any time during the academic year to view the work on display and explore current and previous artists' bios and work below.
JOHN SABRAW
Artist John Sabraw was born in Lakenheath, England. An activist and environmentalist, Sabraw’s paintings, drawings and collaborative installations are produced in an eco-conscious manner, and he continually works toward a fully sustainable practice. He collaborates with scientists on many projects, and one of his current collaborations involves creating paint and paintings from iron oxide extracted in the process of remediating polluted streams. This sustainably sourced pigment is now for sale as a 3 tube set from Gamblin Artists Colors.
His series "Vital," currently on view at the Center for the Environment, are abstract explorations that focus on natural phenomena, the earth’s ecosystem as a whole, and our role within that. This understanding has led him to incorporate ever more sustainable practices in his studio, life, and when possible actively engaging the public on the matter.
In this body of work, painstaking painting methods are coaxed into interacting and amalgamating over durations of up to several months. The result is complex, luminous, mysterious paintings that strike a beautiful balance between controlled and organic processes. He works with earth minerals referring to their past while asking questions about their future: He uses iron oxides extracted from contemporary pollution. Many abandoned coal mines fill with water which reacts with sulfides and mineral surfaces producing high concentrations of sulfuric acid and iron—acid mine drainage pollution (AMD). Sabraw's team created a refining process, by which AMD can continuously be treated, restoring streams to support aquatic life. Iron oxide pigment in the treatment process and can be sold to offset the clean-up costs. They incorporate coal and other sedimentary rock—fossil fuels that represent the source for so much damage in our waterways. The juxtaposition of these works brings an intimacy to the Anthropocene, connecting-the-dots, spurring direct action.
Sabraw’s art is in numerous collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Honolulu, the Elmhurst Museum in Illinois, Emprise Bank, Bank of America, and Accenture Corp. He is represented by McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL; Qualia Contemporary Art, Palo Alto, CA.
Sabraw is a Professor of Art at Ohio University where he chairs the Painting + Drawing and Digital Art + Technology programs and is Board Advisor at Scribble Art Workshop in New York. He has most recently been featured in TED, Smithsonian, New Scientist, London, Great big Stories, Business Insider, and Time.
JERI EISENBERG
Jeri Eisenberg works primarily with non-traditional and alternative photo-based techniques. She represses or subverts traditional photography's emphasis on the representational qualities of the medium, and emphasizes instead the medium's expressive nature. She employs a strong sense of materiality and seductive surfaces in her work, to evoke sense memories and visceral connections. Her work steadfastly serves as an affirmation of beauty in the everyday natural world, but is tinged with the bittersweet—a reminder of the temporal condition, and an elegy for life.
Works included on this site reside in public, corporate and private collections across the country and internationally. Collections include:
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
- Paiva Collection, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Center for Photography at Woodstock Permanent Collection, Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, New York
- Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, New York
- Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
- Schenectady Museum of Innovation and Science, Schenectady, New York
- Weill-Cornell Medical Center, New York
- Tiffany’s, Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong
- Sheraton Hotel, Stockholm
- HSBC Bank, New York, New York
- Banana Republic, New York, New York
- Babcock and Brown, New York, New York
- McKenna, Long & Aldridge, Los Angeles
- Vinson & Elkins, LLP, Houston, Texas
- State Street Corporation, Boston, Massachusetts
- Woodstock Inn and Spa, Woodstock, Vermont
CARLEEN SHEEHAN
In her on-going photography projects and installations, Carleen Sheehan documents the natural environment from an intimate perspective, celebrating small fragments of natural ephemera: the movement and density of water, shifts in light, color, and atmosphere. She often works in specific areas over time, allowing a sense of place to unfold within shifting contexts and conditions. Sheehan is interested in what we see and what we don’t as we move through complex spaces. She works with her cameras to draw with light, using them to scan, record, and understand place in a way that is both tactile and incremental. Sheehan is also a member of the Visual Arts faculty at Fordham University in New York.
Sheehan’s images from the Arctic were collected during two trips to the region in 2017 and 2018. The first, to the archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, in the High Arctic, was supported by The Arctic Circle Residency Program, a sailing expedition for artists and scientists along the Spitsbergen coast. The following year she traveled to Iceland to work in the Vatnajokull Glacier region. While in Reykjavik, Sheehan consulted with Oddur Sigurdsson at the Icelandic Meteorological Office, who identified the Tyndall formations in her photographs from Svalbard. These images commemorate and document glacial ice as it melts and transforms under the solstice sun.
Sheehan’s studio practice incorporates a range of media, including painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking. Images sampled from a variety of sources are synthesized and spliced into densely layered fields that hum with ambient detail and embedded imagery. Woven into the work are references to the heightened impact of climate shifts on both the built and natural worlds. Sheehan creates open-ended narratives in a space that is both compressed yet floating, one that reveals itself by unfolding and unraveling, creating connections and generating content.
In addition to The Arctic Circle Residency, Sheehan is the recipient of residency fellowships to MacDowell, The Corporation of Yaddo, The Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Bali Purnati Center for the Arts in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. She is anticipating a journey to Antarctica as part of her participation in the traveling exhibition, Change: The National Geographic Endurance Project, curated by artist Zaria Forman. Sheehan has received grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as Mellon Challenge grants for travel and curatorial projects. Sheehan’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at Karen McCready Gallery, NY; Jill Newhouse Gallery, NY; Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Thompson/Giroux Gallery, Chatham, NY; The Brooklyn Museum; The Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; The Shaker Museum, New Lebanon, NY; The Yerba Buena Art Center, Los Angeles; and Kyoto-Seika University, Kyoto, Japan.
MEGHANN RIEPENHOFF
Born in Atlanta, GA, Meghann Riepenhoff is an artist based on the west coast of the United States. She received a BFA in Photography from the University of Georgia, and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Her exhibitions include the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Yossi Milo Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, Jackson Fine Art, Haines Gallery, The New York Public Library, C/O Berlin, and the Aperture Foundation, among others. Publications include ArtForum, The New York Times, Time Magazine Lightbox, The Guardian, Foam, Oprah Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and Wired Magazine. Collections include the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Harvard Art Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Riepenhoff published two monographs Littoral Drift + Ecotone and Ice with Radius Books and Yossi Milo Gallery. She was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts and the John Michael Kohler Center for the Arts, was an Affiliate at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and is a Guggenheim Fellow.
DANIEL BETLRÁ
Born in Madrid, Spain, Daniel Beltrá is a photographer based in Seattle, Washington. His passion for conservation is evident in images of our environment that are evocatively poignant. The most striking large-scale photographs by Beltrá are images shot from the air. This perspective gives the viewer a wider context to the beauty and destruction he witnesses, as well as revealing a delicate sense of scale. After two months of photographing the Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oil Spill, he produced many visually arresting images of the man-made disaster.
Over the past two decades, Beltrá’s work has taken him to all seven continents, including several expeditions to the Brazilian Amazon, the Arctic, the Southern Oceans and the Patagonian ice fields. For his work on the Gulf Oil Spill, in 2011 he received the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award and the Lucie Award for the International Photographer of the Year - Deeper Perspective,. His SPILL photos toured the world independently and as part of the Prix Pictet exhibitions. In 2009, Beltrá received the prestigious Prince’s Rainforest Project award granted by Prince Charles. Other highlights include the BBVA Foundation award in 2013 and the inaugural “Global Vision Award” from the Pictures of the Year International in 2008. In 2006, 2007 and 2018 he received awards for his work in the Amazon from World Press Photo. Daniel’s work has been published by the most prominent international publications including The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Le Monde, and El Pais, amongst many others.
Daniel Beltrá is a fellow of the prestigious International League of Conservation Photographers.
DAVID MAISEL
David Maisel is an artist working in photography, painting, and video. He is the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Among his chief concerns are the politics and aesthetics of radically human-altered environments, and how we perceive our place in time via investigations of cultural artifacts from both past and present. His work focuses on power and the production of space by examining landscapes and objects that are off-limits, quarantined, or hidden from view.
Maisel received his BA from Princeton University, and his MFA from California College of the Arts, in addition to study at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He resides in San Francisco, CA. He is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery, NY; Haines Gallery, San Francisco; Robischon Gallery, Denver; and Ivorypress Gallery, Madrid.
ZARIA FORMAN
Zaria Forman documents climate change with pastel drawings. She travels to remote regions of the world to collect images and inspiration for her work, which is exhibited worldwide. She has flown with NASA on several Operation IceBridge missions over Antarctica, Greenland, and Arctic Canada. She was featured on CBS Sunday Morning, CNN, PBS, and BBC. She delivered a TEDTalk, and spoke at Amazon, Google, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, exhibited in Banksy’s Dismaland, and was the artist-in-residence aboard the National Geographic Explorer in Antarctica. Forman curated the first ever, permanent, polar art exhibitions aboard Lindblad Expeditions National Geographic Endurance and the National Geographic Resolution. Her works have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, and the Smithsonian Magazine. Forman currently works and resides in upstate New York, and is represented by Winston Wächter Fine Art in New York, NY and Seattle, WA.