“Displacement” Exhibition in Boston Highlights People and Cultures Uprooted by Climate Change

Artists, scholars, and activists are narrating the climate crisis in many different ways, but typically, the emphasis is on urgency—as with the dramatic actions of Just Stop Oil, for example. Against this, Black Gold Tapestry (2008–17), an embroidered artwork nine years in the making by Canadian artist Sandra M. Sawatzky, stands apart. Currently on view at the MassArt Art Museum in Boston, the nearly 220-foot tapestry insists on a much longer timeline—both in its production and in the history it tells. The work focuses on humans’ relationship to oil over the course of millennia, and is part of an exhibition, titled “Displacement,” that addresses the human consequences of environmental change, including the forced migration so many people experience in the wake of either immediate disaster or slowly shifting climates.

While oil culture is generally thought of as a distinctly modern phenomenon, Sawatzky’s research reveals human engagements with the material dating to the Neolithic era. Showing illustrative, colorful scenes of Neanderthals fashioning tools with sticky tar, bitumen mortar in Mesopotamian structures, Chinese naphtha stoves, and eventually the US automotive industry, the work reveals the ways oil has permeated human production across cultures. Dinosaurs dancing along the edge of Sawatzky’s tapestry remind us of the 65-million-year-old source of the fossil fuels we are so rapidly burning.

Sawatzky was inspired by the iconic Bayeux Tapestry, and her work borrows a number of conceits from that 11th-century account of a Norman conquest, including its linear narrative and the playful dialogue between the scrolling, horizontal storyline and the border of the image. In the Bayeux Tapestry, the arrival of Hayley’s Comet causes a break in the frame. But Sawatzky’s story offers no such moment of rupture pinpointing the moment when it all went wrong, marking the dawn of the Anthropocene. Instead, it emphasizes a continually unfolding story in which everyone has a role to play.

The slowness of Sawatzky’s embroidery recalls writer Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, a way of describing the cumulative, incremental effects of climate change. Environmental change is often insidious and unseen. “Displacement” finds ways to help us visualize that violence regardless, focusing on human migration, adaptation, and extinction. In Akea Brionne’s Begin Again: Land of Enchantment (2024), an embellished tapestry based on a photograph, the artist references her own family’s migration from Belize to Honduras to New Orleans, moves often driven by shifting waterways that induced both flooding and drought. Three women wait with stuffed suitcases in a desert landscape. Their sequined garments, incongruous with the outdoor scene, suggest both a resilient dreamscape and an alienation from the landscape that results from constant displacement.

In his book Slow Violence and The Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Nixon emphasizes the particular injustice of environmental crises precipitated by the actions of the wealthy but felt most acutely by the poor for whom migration is a means of survival. At MAAM, the universal history proposed by Sawatzky’s tapestry is counterbalanced by artists who tell specific stories about the uneven realities of climate change. Nguyen Smith’s Bundle House Borderlines No. 3 (Isle de Tribamartica), from 2017, disaggregates the idea of a singular Caribbean by way of a fantastical hand drawn and collaged map that combines the shorelines of Trinidad, Cuba, Martinique, Haiti, and Jamaica. Referencing the antiquated style of colonial cartography and the attendant misunderstandings of local geographies, Smith asks viewers to think about what they really know about the Caribbean—a region he terms “ground zero” of climate disaster—in a work laced with Trinidadian and Zambian soil. Sculptures on view nearby model “bundle houses” made of found objects, small evocations of the scavenger existence required in the wake of disaster.

Mapping is likewise central to the critical charge of Imani Jacqueline Brown’s work, What remains at the ends of the earth? (2022). She begins, like Sawatzky, with the long history of oil, but here she traces the geographic overlap of oil fields with colonial plantations in coastal Louisiana. Some of the most polluting petrochemical refineries in the US, Brown’s research reveals, occupy former sugarcane fields. Tracking the spatial intersections between plantation slavery and extractive capitalism demonstrates the systemic and ongoing exploitation of both people and place in a region so polluted that it is colloquially known as “Cancer Alley.” Brown’s video installation moves between the cold precision of aerial photography, the swirling iridescence of oily waters, and a graphic plotting of oil and gas networks that resembles the constellations that guided enslaved peoples out of these very sites. The shining stars evoke resistance in the face of disaster, a resistance Brown also finds in the roots of magnolia and willow trees planted by enslaved peoples. Such roots are what hold the fragile, constantly eroding soil in place. Brown, like many artists in “Displacement,” promotes attention to the human realities and resiliencies that accompany living through a time of constant change.