THE CLIMATE MUSEUM LAUNCHES PARTICIPATORY PUBLIC ART CAMPAIGN FEATURING ARTIST MONA CHALABI
New York, NY (Aug. 2, 2021) – The Climate Museum has launched a participatory arts campaign, Beyond Lies, focusing on fossil fuel media literacy and inviting the public to take action. In a series of posters created by celebrated illustrator and data journalist Mona Chalabi, Beyond Lies distills work by experts including award-winning investigative journalists, academic researchers, and policy analysts on the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long disinformation crusade.
The Museum launched the public art campaign on July 31 with an outreach and civic action event at its exhibition hub on Governors Island; photos are included below. The campaign will continue through Winter 2022 with a series of school visits, open houses, events in public parks, community posting initiatives, social media activations, and more.
The posters pair striking visual storytelling with equally remarkable data points. They also incorporate access to an interactive website foregrounding a call to civic action, experts on video, and other educational resources. The campaign encourages viewers to see beyond the misleading claims and the influence of the fossil fuel industry: Beyond Individual Blame, Beyond Empty Promises, and Beyond Business as Usual.
On the campaign website, beyondlies.org, the public can:
Take action — by following recommendations for calling members of Congress and the White House
Join the campaign — by downloading free copies of the posters. They can be printed at home to be hung throughout one’s neighborhood or shared across social media platforms, tagging @climatemuseum, #BeyondLies, and #CultureForAction. The Climate Museum will also send printed posters and an instruction sheet to community members who request them.
Learn more — through short videos featuring experts on fossil fuel disinformation.
Free posters can also be picked up daily at the Climate Museum Exhibition Hub, House 18, Nolan Park, Governors Island during the Island’s open hours. Ferry schedules and locations in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn can be found here.
“The fossil fuel industry’s long-standing deception has delayed climate action, exactly as they intended. This delay has caused the climate disruption we’re experiencing this summer, '' said Miranda Massie, Director of the Climate Museum. “We must empower community members to be advocates for eliminating the industry’s malign influence over climate policy, starting immediately.”
The Climate Museum’s campaign will spotlight the need for timely action by Congress to prioritize ambitious climate action free of fossil fuel industry influence. The campaign mobilizes dozens of high school students who have been trained as climate action volunteers to amplify these messages. These youth ambassadors will hang posters in community hubs in their neighborhoods, creating opportunities to start climate conversations with business owners, community leaders, and their peers. Their dialogues and outreach will reveal truths about the fossil fuel industry, build community through Chalabi’s activist art, and invite people into collective action.
An early response to the campaign from an attendee at the Beyond Lies launch: "I'm impressed but on the road to shocked. The coining of the term carbon footprint—what a masterful lie. It's designed to point the finger at us. I'm a teacher and I intend to write this information into my curriculum and send it around to every audience I can think of—I'll share with my work audience, with students, and with my friends at Tai chi."
Images from the campaign launch and downloadable poster files are below.
About the Climate Museum
The Climate Museum’s mission is to inspire action on the climate crisis with programming across the arts and sciences that deepens understanding, builds connections, and advances just solutions. In its public programming to date, it has created an activist cultural approach to community engagement with climate, recognizing that most Americans are worried about the climate crisis but are unsure how to take meaningful action. The Museum’s free, accessible exhibitions, art installations, events, youth programs, and more have touched tens of thousands of New Yorkers and visitors and received extensive recognition, broadening the climate movement with an emphasis on community, justice, equity, and inclusion. Programs are presented at the Museum’s exhibition hub on Governors Island, in parks, galleries, in venues citywide and, in 2020-2021, through virtual events. The Museum is currently scaling out to a permanent, year-round presence in New York City. Additional information is available at climatemuseum.org.
About Mona Chalabi
Mona Chalabi is a data journalist. She writes for print as well as radio and TV. Her journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, The Guardian and many more locations, including Netflix, BBC, Channel 4 and NPR. She is also an illustrator whose work is regularly exhibited at institutions like The World Trade Center, the Tate, The Design Museum, The House of Illustration, and the V&A. Lastly, she’s a producer and presenter of programs like Vagina Dispatches, The Fix, and Strange Bird. She’s an honorary fellow of the British Science Association. Before she became a journalist, Mona worked with large data sets at the Bank of England, Transparency International, and the International Organization for Migration. She studied International Relations in Paris and Arabic in Jordan. Mona grew up in London and is a grown-up in New York. Additional information is available at monachalabi.com.
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