Mary Mattingly is featured as a key artist in the climate activism movement in an article exploring the significant experiments that have best captured the country’s idealistic spirit.
By: Zoë Lescaze
Rethinking society requires imagination. Below are ten American movements from different eras of the country’s history and the defining works of art they produced.
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10. Climate Activism
In the 2013 book, “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World,” the philosopher Timothy Morton came up with the term “hyperobject” to describe phenomena so “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” they defy comprehension. Climate change is a hyperobject, according to Morton, which is what makes it so difficult to combat. Rather than despair at the scope of our current environmental crisis, though, the artist Mary Mattingly creates works of art that double as pilot programs in how societies might rethink broken systems. In 2016, she docked “Swale,” a barge supporting a garden of edible plants, in the South Bronx for locals with otherwise limited access to fresh produce. Anyone could come and pick as many herbs, fruits and vegetables as they wanted. Foraging in city parks is illegal, but the monumental sculpture helped local advocates and Parks Department officials establish the Bronx River Foodway, the first parkland where foraging is permitted. A new incarnation of “Swale” called “Floating Garden” is slated to return to New York City later this year.
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