Using their newly crafted narratives and curated artwork from the three sections of this unit of study, students will be ready to build their Black Art and Climate Justice Museum Exhibit. Given the ongoing devastation and grim predictions related to the current climate crisis, students’ work will acknowledge this reality, while at the same time envision another world where healing is feminist, indigenous, youth led, queer, anti-racist, and intersectional. Building upon these counternarratives, students should reflect on how the ideas related to this kind of healing show up throughout the unit. What art and texts most align with these ideas? How can commitment, love, and hope lead to radical change?
This desire to envision and create a better world is nothing new. In 1956, at the First International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists, the authors of Presence Africaine described the role of culture and its effort to “reconstruct a world which is filled with life, thought and passion and seems to thirst more than ever for justice, love and peace.” The authors of the Presence Africaine also named accessibility as a key component of problem solving. “It is important that the great problems should be accessible to every conscience, and that all the cultural originalities should be within everyone's reach.”56 One of the most pressing “great problems” is the current climate crisis. The failure to address this crisis is rooted in the ongoing exclusion of women, indigenous people, young people, Black people, people of color, and queer people as problem solvers whose ideas will bring out radical change the world so desperately needs.
