Equal Earth, an environmental storytelling group founded and led by Linda de Boer ’27, hosted an exhibition showcasing student artists in collaboration with the Andover Youth Climate Summit this past Sunday, featuring keynote speaker and documentarian Anna Miller. Set outside Kemper Auditorium and the Underwood Room, where the Summit took place, the Earth Month Exhibit featured poetry, prose, pottery, prints, photography, sculptures, and mixed media.
De Boer contributed a sculpture titled Ocean: a female figure wearing a deep blue, structured dress shaped like a splash of water and adorned with pearls. She explained the decision to pair the exhibit with the Youth Climate Summit.
“We were thinking of putting [the exhibit] at the end of April anyway, and then we noticed that the summit was this weekend. Having another environmental artist being the focus of the summit was a really good coincidence… The theme was environmental narratives, and that can be anything from a critique about climate change, like an essay to a food recipe about a sustainable meal to a sculpture or art piece representing the ocean. It’s just any kind of way in which the artist engages with nature or climate issues,” said de Boer.
Phillips Academy Sustainability Coalition (PASC) board member Anastasie Sycheva ’29, who submitted a set of linocut prints titled Let Yourself Grow, detailed the process of sourcing artwork and the challenges the club encountered.
“We’ve been hosting meetings throughout the year talking about this collection of artwork that is going to be, starting on April 26, displayed in the Kemper Gallery near the Underwood Room… We talked about books like ‘The Parable of the Sower’ by Octavia Butler and how that is very deeply rooted in climate storytelling. We also talked about lighter topics like Claude Monet’s paintings, which capture the essence of nature… We reached out to a few different schools and their environmental clubs, their writing clubs, their art clubs, [and more.] Unfortunately, that was actually a challenge. We reached out to so many schools, and none of them really responded. In the end, our exhibition only consisted of Andover students’ work,” said Sycheva.
Breanna Ren ’29 submitted a visual art piece entitled Synthetic Impressionism, consisting of two renderings of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, one in watercolor and one in marker, side by side and covered by psychedelically colored pipe cleaner flowers. She discussed her personal connection to the exhibition and her intended message.
“I was asked by one of the board members to create a piece that related to environmental sustainability… [Synthetic Impressionism] deals with the fact that Van Gogh preserved the beauty of the sunflowers through the art of painting, while, in the modern day, we achieve the preservation of these flowers through plastic. It’s the clash of two forevers, one being remembrance through history, the other being that they will never leave the earth, as it’s plastic… Something I want audiences to take away from this is that we can express our opinions through mediums that aren’t necessarily writing or speech, like visual arts, dance, photography,” said Ren.
Sophia Zhan ’28, who attended the exhibition over the long weekend, offered her interpretation of Ren’s work.
“I thought [Synthetic Impressionism] was a very cross-cultural and also anachronistic combination of two art styles. I really like how sunflowers are something that I usually see as being very happy. I thought it was a very creative idea to put both 3D expression, in the form of pipe cleaners, which is something more modern, with Van Gogh’s Impressionist style, and the style was mimicked very well. You can clearly see that they’re trying to compare the two,” said Zhan.
De Boer emphasized the exhibit’s broader purpose to the student body.
“I really hope people will think about how connected we are with the environment because oftentimes we like to isolate ourselves and say that climate change and addressing climate issues [are] not related to humans or that it’s far off in the future… But climate change has huge impacts on humans in the form of ruining our homes, forcing us to move, and threatening our health. And so I really hope that by seeing the art that students have made relating to climate change and nature, people can realize how closely connected we are to nature and really think about how climate change has such big effects on us as humans,” said de Boer.
