The Art of Resilience: Imagining New Futures In A Changing Climate

SPACE Gallery exhibition opening on April 4, 2025 - photo credit: Nick Eaton, Life in Focus.

By Charlotte Van Voorhis

This piece was originally published on Wednesday, September 3, 2025 in Art Business News, original article found here.

On an unseasonably warm spring afternoon in Portland, Maine, this April, the SPACE Gallery opened an exhibition titled Envision Resilience: Shifting Tides and Evolving Landscapes, which paired innovative student design strategies for adapting to a changing climate with the powerful artwork of seven Maine-based artists. This exhibition, the culmination of the fourth annual Envision Resilience Challenge, drew visitors into a discussion about climate change and community resilience through art.

Curated by esteemed local artist Brian Smith, whose work inspired by queer ecological theory has been exhibited across the U.S. and in Belgium, the SPACE Gallery multimedia exhibition created an immersive environment where designs using recycled plastic bags complemented digital renderings of floating architecture. Underwater paintings sat adjacent to storm surge projections, and virtual reality videos and seaweed sculptures alike drew people deeper into contemplation. Smith’s work aims to provide a more optimistic outlook on climate change, as explained in his curatorial vision: “When everything [regarding our changing climate] feels really dark and scary, we can acknowledge that that’s all very real, but that we’re also very resilient people and can figure it out.”

Photo credit: Nick Eaton, Life in Focus.

The featured artists’ work embodied this spirit of resilience and imagination.

• Portland-based interdisciplinary artist Benjamin Spalding created birds with wood, steel and acrylic, gouache, colored pencil and pastel, which brought movement and rhythm inspired by his Puerto Rican roots and nature.

• Internationally trained artist and educator Haley Nannig contributed her impressive silk work depicting historic fishing shacks washed away in the historic January 2024 storms, with layered paintings conveying the fluidity and beauty of the environment.

• Sculptor Ian Ellis provided sustainably crafted designs with natural and reclaimed elements, including steel, kelp and Irish moss to honor overlooked aspects of Maine’s ecology.

• Jordan Carey blended Bermudian craft and social critique through his expertise in fashion and kite-making, using bamboo, handmade paper and natural indigo dye for his unique creations.

• Lokotah Sanborn’s moving photomontages were influenced by his experience in community organizing for land return, cultural continuity and Indigenous sovereignty.

• Multi-media artist Michel Droge shared immersive, deep-sea–inspired paintings, drawings and film viewed through the lens of queer ecology to promote awareness and conservation of overlooked environmental areas.

• Posey (Pamela Moulton), a Franco-American multidisciplinary artist, collaborated with the community to transform salvaged fishing nets and plastic into playful, eco-mythic installations that highlight climate issues specific to Maine.

Since its first annual Challenge in 2020, Envision Resilience has been working to advance innovative planning and design in the face of climate change through student and community partnerships. By connecting current and future professionals working across disciplines, the organization creates opportunities for communities to reimagine climate challenges and inspire resilient solutions.

Photo credit: Nick Eaton, Life in Focus.

At its heart, Envision Resilience is a place-based, multi-university design studio and community engagement initiative, pairing student teams from participating universities with coastal communities for a semester spent researching and proposing creative ideas for challenges related to housing, stormwater management and coastal infrastructure, habitats, and ecology. But its programming also fosters innovative storytelling – harnessing art’s power to translate complex climate realities into emotionally accessible narratives. Over the past five years, Envision Resilience has bridged science, design, and art throughout communities on the front lines of climate change throughout the Northeast.

A few weeks prior to the installation at the SPACE Gallery, another exhibition unfolded at the Portland Public Library in February where visitors encountered student designs alongside the vibrant work of illustrator Lin Snow. Snow’s naturalist illustrations, with their vivid chromatic lens, provided visual reflections on ecosystem balance and climate impacts that complemented the technical innovation of the student design proposals. From living shorelines and green stormwater infrastructure to reimagined transportation systems in a low-carbon future, each design was developed through months of community engagement with Portland and South Portland residents.

Community participation is key to the challenge, not only in developing designs for the future but also in sharing and embracing that vision through a series of public exhibitions. This collaborative approach continued at the South Portland Public Library in March, where Pame Chévez Zendejas’s artwork punctuated the exhibition space. The visual artist’s work examines the natural world through compelling imagery that explores climate change impacts on ecosystems and communities. Her contributions offered striking visual reflections on resilience and adaptation, drawing parallels between student innovation and artistic interpretation.

Josie Morway’s The Seas Are Rising and So Are We mural in Warren, Rhode Island - Photo credit: Envision Resilience

From flood lines stenciled on sidewalks to murals that echo community voices, Envision Resilience has brought climate adaptation into public view, turning buildings and streetscapes into vivid calls for action. In October 2021, as part of their inaugural Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge on Nantucket, the program unveiled the “Rising Above” light projection, which transformed the historic scallop shanty on Old North Wharf into a compelling story of rising seas and shifting shorelines. Owned by Nantucket native and environmental advocate Ginger Andrews, the shanty took on new life as a luminous symbol of the island’s delicate balance between preservation, adaptation, and inevitable change.

Running on a five-minute loop, a light projection of waves traced historic tides and projected future water levels created by Scenic and Projection Designer Michael Clark, reminding passersby that climate change is already at our door. For Andrews, a fifth-generation scalloper and steward of the island, the shanty became a metaphor for resilience. As she put it, “It’s knowing what you can save, what you can’t save, and getting out of the way when there’s something going down.” This breakthrough moment revealed art’s capacity to transform abstract threats into tangible, emotional experiences.

Building on this understanding of art’s power to conceptualize climate change, the 2022 Envision Resilience Narragansett Bay Challenge celebrated and supported the “The Seas Are Rising and So Are We,” a mural in Warren, Rhode Island developed by The Avenue Concept and the Town of Warren, which honors the endangered saltmarsh sparrow and the fragile habitat it calls home.

Painted by Boston artist Josie Morway, the symbols in the mural were drawn from local ecology and inspired by the first chapter of Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, which chronicles the loss of a beloved tupelo tree to encroaching seas. Echoed through Warren’s streets and beyond was her haunting question: “Who do we want to become as the climate changes us?” Envision Resilience worked with their partners to spread the word and purchased copies of Rush’s book, as well as invited the author, who biked over from Providence for the event, to be available for signing.

Warren’s climate adaptation projects underscore the town’s courage in confronting hard decisions about retreat and resilience—where community advisor and then Director of Planning Bob Rulli was stewarding early phases of the first managed retreat plan for the town. The mural serves as a public gathering point for conversation and awareness, embodying the same principle that guided the Nantucket installation: making the invisible visible through art. It stands as a local reminder, connecting ecological grief with collective resolve.

Mural in New Bedford, Massachusetts, designed by artist Ethan Moyer - Photo credit: Envision Resilience

Envision Resilience doubled down on their community-centered approach for the 2023 Envision Resilience New Bedford and Fairhaven Challenge in Massachusetts with a mural in New Bedford’s North End. Designed by University of Massachusetts Dartmouth College of Visual and Performing Arts student Ethan Moyer and brought to life by local artist and organizer David Andrews, the mural captures a moment of quiet optimism: A young person gazing toward an uncertain future, framed by the neighborhood’s familiar buildings and waves flowing through their hair. The mural was chosen through a neighborhood vote and its unveiling that late summer afternoon on Acushnet Avenue became a celebration – a moment where art brought the community together to see their shared story reflected in color.

This project, born from a collaboration among Envision Resilience, New Bedford Creative, Love the Ave, MassDevelopment TDI and UMass Dartmouth, stands as a testament to the power of public art to unify diverse voices. It grounds climate adaptation in the lived experience, culture, and identity of place, which is a mission that began to take shape three years earlier on another New England coast.

From glowing light installations to colorful murals and thoughtful student designs, each project amplifies local history and perseverance. These stories build community resilience, not only in infrastructure and policy but also in how we understand ourselves and our relationship to a changing world. As Envision Resilience moves beyond 2025, its mission grows bolder and broader. The Portland and South Portland exhibitions this year illustrated a commitment to embedding climate adaptation into everyday life, making it a shared, visible endeavor that connects communities and their parallel climate challenges throughout the Northeast

Envision Resilience reveals art’s transformative power and reinforces the importance of collaboration, creativity and hope in imagining equitable and adaptive futures.