Coffee, tea, and light breakfast will be available starting at 8:00AM.

Introduction, Opening Remarks, and Goals

This panel brings together practitioners working across curatorial leadership, land stewardship, landscape architecture, and institutional critique to explore sustainability as a core element of artistic and organizational practice. Each speaker draws on a distinct disciplinary perspective to interrogate systems—ecological, cultural, infrastructural, and relational—and to propose models that center care, continuity, and transformation. From rethinking land use and Indigenous foodways to embedding environmental responsibility within curatorial and institutional frameworks, these perspectives reveal how sustainability is not only a policy goal, but a conceptual and material practice shaped by place, history, and responsibility. The discussion will reflect on how creative practices and institutional roles can align to advance systemic change—through collaboration, reimagination, and accountability.

This virtual session highlights the ‘Getting Climate Control Under Control’ initiative launched by Tino Sehgal and Caitlin Southwick in 2023. The campaign advocates for climate action through practical adjustments to environmental controls, such as HVAC settings in storage and collections care.

As ecological challenges grow more urgent, cultural institutions across the spectrum—museums, commercial galleries, and auction houses alike—are increasingly called to embed sustainability into their everyday operations. This panel explores how climate consciousness is evolving within a range of arts organizations, each with different scales, missions, and structural models. From aligning values with operations to building internal momentum and sector-wide collaboration, the conversation will highlight both the practical and philosophical dimensions of institutional transformation. Through examples of emissions reduction, sustainable exhibition planning, and internal staff engagement, panelists will reflect on the work of integrating climate action across departments and disciplines.

This virtual Field Report brings together artists, cultural workers, and institutional leaders responding to the recent Los Angeles fires. Speakers will share firsthand accounts of mobilizing both mutual aid and philanthropic relief—foregrounding how differently scaled efforts can be integrated to address urgent needs while building long-term resilience. From grassroots networks to institutional campaigns, the panel considers how preparedness, collaboration, and trust can be meaningfully articulated across diverse contexts. Rather than centering crisis alone, this conversation reflects on how sustained relationships, shared infrastructure, and adaptive practices can shape climate response—before, during, and after moments of disruption. Taken together, these efforts point toward a field-wide model for readiness rooted in care, coordination, and collective capacity.

In this closing conversation, Frances Morris and Imani Jacqueline Brown will first individually reflect on the day’s themes, then together explore the roles that cultural institutions and artists play in shaping climate consciousness—bridging long-term responsibility with urgent action, and systems-level change with individual agency.