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Climate and Devotion
John Haberin New York City
Luana Vitra and Marina Zurkow
Trees, We Breathe: Art and Climate Change
Luana Vitra thinks of her work as "devotional offerings." Is it too late to show her devotion, to her African roots, her native Brazil, and the earth? And who will receive her offerings—apart from those who already enriched themselves on the former Congo? If Marina Zurkow is right, when it comes to the earth's mineral and material resources, people were past caring long ago.
Speaking of caring, bringing trees to Wave Hill is like carrying coals to Newcastle. Make that its antidote—an antidote that it delivers harried New Yorkers every day. If Vitra and Zurkow make climate change a priority, "Trees, We Breathe" brings it back to actual changes in a tree-lined garden. 
It is not the first time that I have caught up with artists fascinated by trees or even the second. The show may itself seem old. Yet it is as alive as summer art.
While a bit remote, the public garden and cultural center has a free shuttle van late each week from the last stop on the subway in the Bronx, but you may not need it. The distance from midtown is part of the cure. I look forward each year to the half hour walk from Van Cortlandt Park, past Tudor houses that I could not possibly afford. I make a point of it, along with a report on summer art inside and out, and this year's group show is all about trees. The Glyndor Gallery invites you to take a deep breath, inside and out. If trees are short of breath, too, such is climate change.
Signs of life
For Luana Vitra at SculptureCenter, the solution is simple. She shows her love for nature and its resources through her art. A work titled Amulets should ward off harm, to humans or the earth, but here the curtains are light as feathers. Feathers cover the entrance wall, dyed a clear white and deep blue that should draw anyone closer to appreciate their art. The mineral dye, lapis lazuli, is from Brazil but perhaps better known from a poem named for it by William Butler Years. Its color is at once sky blue and electric.
It aims, in other words, to show both beauty and respect, like another offering to the gods. As Yeats wrote, "Every discolouration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent / Seems a water-course or an avalanche." Minas Gerais, the place Vitra calls home, is rich in iron ore and other minerals, and she throws in both, in ceramics that morph into drum sets and towers into bowls for precious metals. Arrows point upward and outward as protection from further mining. White fabric wraps the whole, like bandages for a broken earth. More feathers produce a white curtain.
Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona have the small back room for a slide show and performance, growing steadily in volume and determination to an anticlimactic standoff. Suffice it to say that its lovers do not get along. (It lost me.) Vitra by comparison may seem to avoid hard questions, but she takes due care to construct a proper offering. The installation winds its stately way through the gallery, as a tribute to her ancestors. To quote Yeats again, "Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay."
Signs of recent life appear clearly enough with Marina Zurkow at the Whitney, if not gods. A billboard still stands in a schematic but wonderfully detailed landscape. A picnic table has its place, too, right in the foreground, with a pond of sorts in the middle distance. Every so often, the sky teems with butterflies, lending their color to video's artificial chill. People join them as well, in bear-fur blackface and comic yellow hazmat suits, and they better work fast. That pond is really a sinkhole, and a picnic, if any, would have already sunk.
The cast soon retires, leaving the blank billboard, an abandoned backyard grill, and a wintry landscapes. This is her Mesocosm—not a microcosm of devotional energy, but a middle ground where it might not be safe to kneel or to stand. Zurkow pairs it with The Earth Eaters, a second video still more dire in what it shows. An eruption every few seconds spills molten rock, roughly where the sinkhole has its dangers in Mesocosm. The real earth eaters are the humans who did the damage in extracting resources and leaving the rest to a dismal fate. Her animation has a cosmic and comic energy all the same.
It also has a sculptural counterpart just outside on the terrace, where Zurkow responds to the Whitney Museum site by the Hudson, much as her video responds to its source code. The River Is a Circle, which sounds downright hopeful. A teardrop in shape, like the results of a map search, rises to a well-crafted wood bench. Naturally enough, though, no seating permitted, with or without a picnic. A sphere behind it echoes the science behind a buckyball by Buckminster Fuller, and blue tubes have their own charm and precision. The Whitney has its site-specific art, too, by David Hammons, in place of a former pier (just south of Barry Diller's Little Island). Oh, the trade-offs in a return to earth.
Hope in trees
Wave Hill offers no end of green framing its plush lawn, its greenhouses, and the view to the Palisades across the Hudson. The city as a whole has its share of trees to revive the spirits and to nourish the eye as well—seven million of them, not that far short of its more than eight citizens. Sari Carel calls her painted map City of Trees—with colored dots for trees and wide-open blocks for space to breath. If it is a little spooky, like the view from a drone or a UFO, she keeps things positive, like the show as a whole. Leave politics to others with less art and fewer trees. Its best-known contributor, Yoko Ono, welcomes visitors to write down their personal hopes before tying them to actual trees outdoors.
Remember last summer's "Perfect Trouble"? This summer's show revels in imperfections, like most families. Sonja John photographs her next of kin perched high in the trees, in a room of floral patterns like stained glass. Not that she is part of the main show, but she lets in plenty of light. So does Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, who hangs her colors from the ceiling like a spiritual being or a spirit home. But they could be, like John in the sun room, for greater unity and intimacy.
Same for Sara Jimenez outdoors, with black ceramic urns in the shape of women's heads, as with Folding Field. The accompanying red curtain descends from trees, torn but taking in the breeze. Same, too, for SuRan Song and William M. Weis III, with You're Soaking in It. It sounds like more than their canopy bed can deliver, and it is. An actual if unlikely part of the show, Rose B. Simpson stands masked guards by the gallery entrance in steel, but then someone must stand watch over people and the earth. (Monica Duncan and Jennifer Tobas had not yet set out their work, replacing Phingbodhipakkiya and John, when I came.)
Trees take on the materials of everyday life, and they never let go, not even in the face of global warming and climate change. Andrea Bowers starts with an assemblage of mugs, pots, and pints that I can only trust has something to do with growth. And then she nestles in a tree trunk in the face of deforestation and her own Eco Grief. In the end, though, the most effective memories are the most direct. Rachel Sussman gives trees their due in something akin to portrait photos, including balboa, the tree of life. Weihui Lu in ink extends branches gathered from Wave Hill itself with all the elusive elegance of Chinese calligraphy.
These artists carry trees from nature and return them to nature, with echoes of the gallery. Trees come in gold and ink for Sarah Ahmad. They lie flat in bark and latex for Carlie Trosclair and Sam Van Aken. They come cast in white as chestnuts for Michelle Frick. Their branches become surgical tools for Ben Gould. Woe to those who do not undergo the operation.
Here hope lies in trees, but the burden falls on you. Julia Oldham on video imagines their "escape from destruction" in the electric colors of fantasy fiction, while Yeseul Song and Jesse Simpson hear a Whisper of Sunken Forest waiting to rise. Yet healing lies in you as well. The comma in "Trees, We Breathe" changes everything. People breathe air replenished by trees, and people dare to claim it as their due.
Luana Vitra ran at SculptureCenter through July 28, 2025, Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona through 9. Marina Zurkow ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through January 11. "Trees, We Breathe," SuRan Song, and William M. Weis III ran at Wave Hill's Glyndor Gallery through September 1, Sonja John and Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya through July 13, Sara Jimenez through September 21,