How do we make public art in a climate crisis?

In the once industrial area of Al Quoz, on the western end of rapidly urbanizing Dubai, public green spaces can be hard to come by. But the concrete-covered factory district actually abounds with wild gardens — or so the artist Muhannad Shono has found — you just need to know where to look for them.  

Snaking out from alleyways or springing up between sidewalk slabs, the Saudi artist noticed the small plots and patches hiding in plain sight. Everywhere, growing beneath the desert city's gigantic arsenal of air-conditioning units, you can find a variety of plant life, fed by the machine's constant drip, drip, drip. Shono wondered if that waste water could be diverted to coax all those accidental gardens out from their hiding spots. 

Working with the Toronto-based curator Tairone Bastien as part of his A Feral Commons project, Shono's installation, A Forgotten Place, transforms the laneway between some Al Quoz warehouses into a public oasis filled with medicinal and edible native plants, all irrigated by the runoff from the nearby businesses' AC units. The artist's site intervention intends to breathe life into an overlooked space. And it does so in a way that's friendly to human and non-human beings alike.  

Last month, Bastien presented the newly-completed work at a symposium in Toronto focused on sustainability in public art. Hosted by the Bentway, which develops, operates and programs the public space beneath Toronto's Gardiner Expressway, the conference brought together more than 30 cultural organization dedicated to the exhibition of temporary public art to discuss how they can responsibly do their work — and how the nature of that work changes — in the midst of a climate emergency. 

It's a conversation that's been building in the worlds of exhibition-making and museum studies over the past decade. But the dialog has lagged a bit in the context of public art, says Anna Gallagher-Ross, the Bentway's senior manager of programming who was one of the symposium's principal organizers. With art professionals from across Canada and beyond gathering to share habits, challenges, efficiencies, cases and exciting projects with notable enthusiasm, the conference suggests theirs is a conversation that's long overdue.  

"A lot of people were saying this is a turning point for our field," Gallagher-Ross says.

Of course, as in any nascent sphere, establishing some best practices is crucial groundwork. And so representatives from the interdisciplinary research group the Synthetic Collective, Western University's Centre for Sustainable Curating and the non-profit city-builder Evergreen presented a preliminary guide they've devised in partnership with the Bentway to promote "more environmentally conscious ways to curate, create and produce public art."

One example proposed by the free-to-download poster is to create an "afterlife plan" for the artwork. The guide asks: "Does it tour to locales within a reasonable distance to amplify the artist's work and sustain them through additional artist fees? Does it get installed again somewhere else in the city? Can local partnerships be forged to donate used materials? Can a circular economy of material exchange amongst artists and organizations be supported?" 

As the symposium unfolded, participants heard about groups across the country already spearheading precisely this kind of work. 

Quebec City's Exmuro, a prolific producer and exhibitor of public art, presented artworks by Robert Hengeveld and Mia Feuer to highlight their organization's innovative circulation program, whereby temporary works enjoy subsequent lives — and sometimes permanent homes — in other venues, as opposed to languishing in studios and storage spaces after their initial installation. 

Hengeveld's Rotating Tree is a living deciduous tree that slowly spins in place using a clever subterranean mechanism. The kinetic sculpture has already been shown in multiple installations, with its tree permanently replanted after each exhibition. Feuer's artwork is a vintage Zamboni salvaged from the scrap yard and transformed into the hull of a geode, with reused plastic waste sparkling inside the resurfacer's body like crystals. "Eighty per cent of the sculpture came out of garbage cans," the artist says. A hit at Exmuro's Passages Insolites festival, where it debuted, the spectacular Feuer installation is an example of a work available from the organization's circulation catalogue just waiting to be reactivated. 

Suzanne Carte, another presenter, calls herself a "cultural dumpster diver." The curator was spurred into action after noticing the "alarming rate" of waste across her sector. She began her punk upstart the Artist Material Fund by showing up with a truck at the loading docks and garbage holds of cultural institutions to salvage what materials — like leftover paint, lumber and old lighting — might be reused by artists (who can take from the fund freely). 

Although her AMF is still the scrappy, self-funded service designed to relocate materials and diminish waste that she launched 10 years ago, she's developed so many relationships in the industry that she's now "invited in through the front door." Carte's presentation ended with a pitch: successful though the AMF may be, she can't continue the operation alone. Whether it's money, time, space or muscle, she needs help.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation of all came from the Bentway itself. The organization undertook a materials audit for the duration of its Summer 2023 season and found it was able to rent, repurpose or recycle 87 per cent of its production materials. This includes 7,500 pounds of bamboo from Leeroy New's otherworldly banyan tree installation that snaked around the highway support beams and the exterior of the Fort York Visitor Centre, which went to the Kortright Centre for Conservation's farm to be used as stakes and mulch after deinstallation.  

If it seems in any way displeasing to turn a sculpture as majestic as New's Balete Bulate Bituka into leaning posts for tomatoes, then perhaps it's time we rethink what our public art does. One of the symposium's key messages — voiced by numerous speakers — was that if any part of public art's job is to reflect the values and priorities of the public, then it can't only concern sustainability, it ought to be sustainable, too. The uncomfortable but evident truth, after all, is that every facet of our lives needs to be made more sustainable. 

"Public art is really what is going to raise awareness and tell the stories we need to tell about the climate emergency," Gallagher-Ross says. "And I think in order to really, in good conscience, raise awareness, we also need to be able to replicate that in how we create the work. We need to put our money where our mouth is."