Andrea Bowers " Mercy Mercy Me"
Andrew Kreps Gallery
This event has ended.
Released in 1971, this influential Marvin Gaye song was, and still is, one of the most popular songs of all time that addresses the degradation of the environment, and other pressing social and political issues. Bill McKibben, American environmentalist, recently wrote about Mercy Mercy Me., “For a brief moment. . .it made perfect sense for the civil rights and environmental movements to be singing the same tune. Tragically, those movements soon diverged - diverged so far that some people still find it odd that activists are working side by side again on issues like global warming and poverty.”
In her current exhibition Bowers investigates the complicated politics of dealing with the contemporary idea of landscape and the problematic relationship of predominantly Eurocentric environmentalist’s attempts to collaborate with locals to fight against climate change. Almost without exception the most endangered locales are populated with people of color and those with low income. And despite their intrinsically humanistic attempts to help, human rights organizations, corporations interested in sponsorship and the Green Movement struggle with compatibility. This exhibition began with a trip that Bowers took with a small group of activists to the Arctic Village in Northern Alaska in the summer of 2009. It is a village of about 150 Native Americans, called Gwich’in, and is located in the southern edge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Media
Schedule
from October 24, 2009 to December 05, 2009