Care and Climate Justice is a series of exhibitions that take place at Sarah Lawrence College and Bronx Community College in winter and spring 2024. The exhibitions are funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, which supports the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE). Against the urgency and presentism suggested by “climate crisis,” these exhibitions turn to responses that might be considered careful and slow, and that shed light on the long histories of environmental devastation on this continent shaped by settler colonialism and racial capitalism. As both an ethic and aesthetic, care takes the form of grief and remembrance, of attention and refusal, of adaptation and kinship, and of expansive imagination and storytelling in anticipation and prefiguration of other futures.
Sarah Lawrence College and Bronx Community College are located in Lenapehoking, close to Manahatta and east of Muhheakantuck (the river that flows both ways – or, the Hudson). Lenapehoking is the ancestral, present, and future homelands of the Lenni-Lenape, who live here in Lenapehoking as well as among the removed Lenape nations located in the lands now known as Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.
In a commitment to the continuation of Lenapehoking in the wake of settler colonial occupation, Sarah Lawrence College, in collaboration with Bronx Community College and the Center for the Urban River and Beczak, is involved in a Living Land Acknowledgment process, which works towards concrete and meaningful actions, in collaboration with Lenape peoples, to further Lenape relationships to ancestral lands. The living component of the acknowledgment means that it is relational – reflective of and responsive to an ongoing, open-ended dialogue. As part of the work of acknowledgment, we encourage you to support the Lenape Center.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Mellon Foundation.
