The main theme that I ended up going with was the melting of the polar ice caps and what is affecting them. This wasn’t some sort of first draft idea that I came up with, it was more of a keep building on an idea until you get something somewhat unique kind of idea. I ended taking up a full day to go through all the possible options on a theme to curate. I first started off by trying to think outside of the box and try something that was less obvious of a theme to try and get something unique that could stand out, but I went too unique and never really found enough artists let alone highly known artists to create an exhibition with. I ended up opting for one of the more common themes; climate change. With this, I had the opposite luck with finding artists and found a plethora of good choices and well-renowned artists. With this good news, I still wished to have some uniqueness to my theme so I tried to pick from within the sub-categories of climate change and ended up going with the melting of the polar ice caps. I actually didn’t come up with a name for the exhibition till about three-fourths of the way through making the website.
For my artist selection, I ended up choosing five artists and eight photos from them in total. The first artist I ended up grabbing was Olafur Eliasson mostly because of seeing his Ice Watch art show in class. He was also one of the main reasons why I picked the theme. The main reason I liked Ice Watch was because of the immense about of metaphor and symbolism behind the melting of the mini icebergs.
The second artist I picked up was Zaria Forman who had some very amazing photorealistic soft pastel drawings of icebergs. Along with the amazing art, was the meaning behind it as Forman had made the pieces while working with NASA on collecting data on the melting speed of polar ice caps around the world. Also, her images just did an amazing job of displaying the decay of the ice caps.
The third artist I found was Daniel Beltrá who is an environmentalist photographer. I ended up making him the main artist of the exhibition mostly because his photographs were amazingly high-detailed and fit perfectly within the theme I had created. The First image I grabbed from him was The Gulf War which was a picture of a boat above a stream of oil coming from Deepwater Horizon which had blown up nearly ten years ago. Although it does not seem like it fits within the theme, the oil spill clean-up operations have tried over 400 controlled burns to get rid of the oil to no prevail. The second photo I got from him was not named so I just used the first half of the description which was a man-made controlled burn that was razing a forest near a national park to give way for more cattle farms. The main reason this photo made it into the exhibition was because it showed one of the causes towards the melting of the ice caps which was greenhouse gases. I grabbed one more image from Beltrá to put right after the second one so it would directly show what burning down forests was doing to ice caps across the world in Greenland.
The fourth artist I ended up adding to the exhibition was Madjeen Isaac. They did not really have any work that correlated to the melting of the polar ice caps let alone climate change, but I chose them and their piece or art because it talked about the need for communities and neighborhoods to work together and try to have a better sustainable lifestyle. I think it works out with the exhibition because it shows what people can do to help fight decaying icebergs in their own way.
The fifth and final artist I added to my exhibition was Agnes Denes. Her work on Tree Mountain was amazingly done from the execution all the way to the meaning behind it. I thought this tied well with how people could help slow down the decaying of icebergs while looking amazing in the process. I also thought that this image also paired well with Madjeen Isaac’s work because of the amount of human labor that went into this. In the end, I thought all the images picked out worked well with the theme of the melting of the polar ice caps and what is affecting them as they all had amazing metaphors, symbolism, and imagery.