Introspection

Today, on the eve of the U.N. Climate Action Summit in NYC, millions of young people around the world are on school strike, with support from those who are walking out of their workplaces and homes, demanding an end to carbon dioxide–producing fossil fuels. The Brooklyn Museum supports the call to take immediate action to address the climate crisis. We are also committed to our own institutional initiatives to go green, which include museum-wide efforts to work with the City to reduce energy consumption by 2050 as part of CreateNYC and to reduce plastics and paper usage in our day-to-day operations.

In the spirit of today’s action, we share a timely work from our contemporary art collection. Valerie Hegarty’s Fallen Bierstadt (2007) is a decaying emblem of Manifest Destiny inspired by 19th-century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt. Hegarty’s work comments on our hubris in thinking we can “triumph” over the natural world, speaking today to the urgency of the human-induced climate crisis.⁠⁠