Green is the new black | How can artists effectively respond to the climate crisis? Introducing a new toolkit from Gallery Climate Coalition

Artists have long been among the most effective responders to the climate and environmental crisis, using their creativity and vision to get the rest of the art world—and the world in general—to take notice and follow suit. As has often been highlighted in this column, artist actions can come in various forms, whether creative or practical, direct or indirect, public or private.

They can be high profile, as with Ackroyd & Harvey’s Grass House (1991-2024), which has seen the artist duo grow grass over the facades of public buildings, and their work planting groves of saplings from the acorns harvested from Joseph Beuys’s 7,000 Kassel oaks. They can be overtly activist, such as when Fiona Banner joined forces with Greenpeace to dump a giant granite “full stop” in the North Sea, as a protest again illegal trawling. Or artists can make lower key but equally meaningful personal decisions, such as Gavin Turk and Tino Sehgal’s refusal to travel by plane, or Gary Hume’s decision to stipulate that his work can only be shipped by land or sea.

Impressive and numerous as they are, however, these actions nonetheless tend to take place in isolation, with artists gathering the necessary information and knowhow under their own steam and as best they can. Thankfully, now help is at hand. A new open-access resource— is the GCC Artist Toolkit—has been developed specifically to support, empower and inform artists of all inclinations who, in whatever way they choose, wish to address the climate and ecological crisis.

Launched this summer and emerging out of more than two years of research, as well as consultation with artists and environmental specialists, it brings together practical ideas, strategies and recourses that artists can use to inform and shape their own responses both within and beyond their own particular practice.

How has the project come about?

The toolkit is the latest service provided by the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), the international charity devoted to facilitating a greener and more sustainable art world, and of which I am a founding member. On its website GCC already has a range of tools and resources, each designed to help facilitate its core aims of reducing the visual art sector’s greenhouse gas emissions by a minimum of 50% by 2030 and promoting near-zero waste practices. These resources—which also include a soon-to-be-updated carbon calculator—have been developed for visual arts organisations in collaboration with environmental advisers and industry professionals.

Yet while many of the GCC guidelines on, for example, travel, shipping, packaging and general energy consumption are hugely relevant to artists, up until now there has been no information tailored specifically for this community.

What does the new artist’s toolkit involve?

After extensive conversations with artists from across the world as to what format would be the most helpful and easy to navigate, GCC has designed a toolkit divided up into distinct sections, each of which offers practical guidance for every step of artistic practice. These include research and development; commissioning; materials; production; exhibition making and display; and acquisitions, which also covers both sales and aftercare.

There is a section on activism that includes lists of helpful organisations with which artists can join forces and another devoted to advocacy, which offers pointers as to how artists—at whatever level of their career—can make their voices heard and help to enact change. These sections can be accessed in any order and within each are further tools, tips and information, offering different levels of detail.

To make the prospect of interfacing with, and having an effect on, climate change and ecological crisis less daunting, each section also contains an “effective actions” shortlist. These begin by mentioning the smallest action one can take within the parameters of that particular topic and then show how that can be expanded upon to cater for measures that have the highest possible impact.

The Materials section, for example, offers a handy documentation template for keeping track of materials, products and processes used in producing works of art, which can then act as a useful means by which to vet suppliers, issue installation and maintenance guidelines and potential conservation treatments. In the Commissioning section, meanwhile, effective actions include integrating “green clauses” into commissioning agreements and contracts, with advice provided by the art law team at Mischcon de Reya.

In addition, every section also includes case studies that offer real examples of meaningful interventions that artists have made. In “exhibition making”, for example, the Australian artist Jessie French demonstrates how she replaces vinyl wall texts and decals with a non-toxic reusable algae polymer developed with conservation scientists. Research and Development, meanwhile, includes discussion of Meditation on Entropy (2023) by the artist X Breidenbach, which is work of art that could be folded into an A4 envelope, simplifying shipping and in turn reducing emissions. And the Materials section discusses Nnenna Okore’s works formed using materials derived from food waste.

Another case study, in the Production section, highlights Deville Cohen, a New York-based artist and founding member of the climate-focused collective Artists Commit, who in 2023 presented K.I.S.S. (Kinetic Independent Solar System). This was the first in a series of outdoor kinetic light sculptures powered by solar energy, created from largely sustainable materials, and accompanied by a careful log of the recourses used.

“Facing the climate crisis, I was often overwhelmed by its scale and complexity,” Cohen says. “As an artist I wanted to meet the crisis not at the scale of the problem but at the scale of my agency. Problems, challenges, difficulties and obstacles are what I face in the studio every day. My ability to meet these insurmountable challenges with creativity is where I chose to locate my agency as an artist.”

It is this sense of agency throughout the artist community that the GCC Artist Toolkit aims to nurture and grow. The toolkit itself will expand too, with new resources and case studies being added all the time.

In the spirit of collaboration which underpins all the GCC’s activities, artists are invited not only to use but also to contribute to its resources. As the introduction to the toolkit states: “the need for action is more urgent than ever.”