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Asma Naeem, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, has an unexpected take on the climate protests that have shaken the art museum world in recent years.
The protests, meant to convey the severity of climate change, have seen precious works of art from Sweden to Washington, D.C., doused in paint and cans of soup by impassioned climate activists. They’ve caused thousands of dollars in damage and prompted some museums to step up security for delicate artwork.
But Baltimore’s Naeem sees a “silver lining” amid the turmoil, despite the damage to priceless artwork.
“The protesters are choosing to come to museums to express their viewpoints, because they see museums as critical sites of civic engagement, of public discourse, of sharing ideas,” Naeem said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun.
The museum already has reviewed its policies for protecting its prized collection of over 97,000 works of art — especially the works similar to the targets of climate protests in other museums, she said.
Now, in Naeem’s second year as director and on the cusp of the museum’s 110th anniversary, the BMA aims to take it a step further.
On Thursday, the museum will unveil a set of environmental initiatives, under the banner “Turn Again to the Earth,” inspired by the words of writer and conservationist Rachel Carson. As part of the effort, the BMA has commissioned a sustainability plan, studying its current environmental practices and recommending improvements. The museum also will announce 10 climate-focused art exhibitions, and begin a citywide “eco-challenge,” encouraging other Baltimore cultural institutions to engage in their own sustainability planning.
The action is long overdue, said Naeem, who readily admits the museum hasn’t done enough on sustainability. There’s plenty of “low-hanging fruit” for the museum to achieve meaningful greenhouse gas reductions, she said.
The climate plan, expected by year’s end, could evaluate how the museum could relax its stringent indoor climate controls to reduce energy use, ways to implement composting for food scraps and strategies to reduce waste associated with packaging artwork and setting up exhibitions, Naeem said.
“Every time we have a new exhibition, we tear down the previous exhibition’s design, and the walls that are associated with that design,” Naeem said. “Those differing constructs mean that we are having, gosh, drywall, just dumped out to the back of our museum.”
The sustainability plan also could call for changes to the museum’s appearance, including updates to the plant life outside its buildings, and how it manages rainwater.
“The most — I think — joyful thing for me that could come out of this is us putting solar panels on our roof,” Naeem said. “What a way to bring the BMA into the 21st century — albeit 25 years late.”
The sustainability plan will be crafted by Lorax, a consulting firm based in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon, which has developed similar plans for Baltimore institutions such as the Baltimore Ravens and the Maryland Zoo, said Katie Fink, the company’s principal.
Lorax will evaluate ways for the museum to curb its water and electricity use, and to decarbonize that usage, said Rebecca Gullott, a senior project manager at Lorax. It will seek ways for the museum to reduce trash, and reuse and recycle more. The plan also will evaluate the museum’s procurement process for eco-friendliness, and suggest ways for the museum to fund its sustainability effort, including through grant programs.
The museum is actually made up of 10 different buildings, with varying ages, HVAC equipment and other infrastructure, said Pete Zadoretzky, who serves as Lorax’s senior director of ESG, or environmental, social and governance. The museum’s main building opened in April 1929.
Suggesting energy use improvements is complicated by the stringent requirements for protecting paintings, sculptures and other works of art.
“It forces us to put our thinking caps on, and think outside the box,” Zadoretzky said
The museum also plans to integrate the climate conversation into its programming, not only by bringing in new exhibitions, but also by reinterpreting artwork already in its permanent collection.
For instance, the museum may add new labels to artwork, highlighting the role of the environment and the natural world in a piece’s creation. Take, for instance, one of the Claude Monet paintings at the museum, “Waterloo Bridge,” “Sunlight Effect” with “Smoke.”
A label for that painting could focus on the rapid industrialization of Monet’s France, which filled the air with the very smoke Monet depicted, Naeem said. Monet paintings could be temporarily relocated in the museum, to form part of a new exhibition interpreting the museum’s European modernist collection through a climate lens, scheduled to begin early next year.
The exhibitions will begin later this year, with “More Than Conquerors” a photographic installation by LaToya Ruby Frazier, focusing on community health workers in Baltimore during the coronavirus pandemic, and the role of environmental racism in the city’s Black communities. Another exhibition, from British guest curator Ekow Eshun, is called “Black Earth Rising,” and brings together works by African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American artists focusing on the ties between colonialism and environmental injustice.
To fuel its climate initiative, the BMA will convene an advisory panel of artists, activists and city leaders. Naeem likened the panel to assembling a “team of rivals,” a quote from American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
“That advisory panel should be including folks who may not necessarily find us to be on the right side of the [climate] issue,” Naeem said.
Other Baltimore institutions such as the National Aquarium and the Maryland Zoo already have joined the museum’s eco-challenge, which “invites civic and cultural leaders throughout the Baltimore region to commit to making one sustainably driven operational change and developing one program to raise environmental awareness in 2025,” according to a news release.
The zoo released its sustainability plan, also developed by Lorax, last year, and has taken several eco-friendly steps recently, said its president and CEO, Kirby Fowler, including transitioning its shuttles to electric power, and composting animal manure that had been incinerated.
The Zoo hopes to help the BMA with its plan, by sharing lessons learned, Fowler said.
“It doesn’t have to be moving heaven and earth,” Fowler said. “You can take care of incremental steps to make improvements — and we just want to get people to start doing that.”
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