ZARIA FORMAN

To experience Zaria Forman’s work is to be drawn into a state of wonder and meaning. Working in chalk and soft pastel that she manipulates using her fingers, Forman creates large-scale landscape drawings, rendered with such exacting precision that they might be photographs, except for the intense colors that no photograph or reproduction can precisely capture.

The images reward contemplation, both because of their serene beauty, and because of the deeper meaning behind them. They are images of landscapes most impacted by climate change, like the polar regions, the glaciers of Greenland, shrinking in a warming world; or the Maldives, low-lying islands under threat from rising seas. They are remote places many will not have the chance to visit before they disappear from this planet forever. Forman’s message is to draw attention to that crisis, before it’s too late.

Sometime between the coronavirus lockdown and the murder of George Floyd, I caught up with Forman to discuss her climate-driven artistic mission, as well as her work, her life, and how her message is evolving in these unprecedented times.

LKH: These are such strange times, with the COVID-19 shutdown and Black Lives Matter protests dominating our media landscape. You’ve always used your platform to address issues. Is that changing now?

ZF: I guess at the moment I just feel really compelled to fill my social media feed with information that will help people. I saw one campaign in particular that called for us to “quiet the white noise” – basically, to have white people be silent during this time of protest, and let people of color, indigenous voices, marginalized voices come to the fore. So, at first, I was going to go quiet on social media, but in communicating further with Black friends, I was hearing, “I think being silent right now is, actually, maybe not the right thing to do.” At that point I decided to participate in the Amplify Melanated Voices campaign [#AmplifyMelanatedVoices], which was about getting out of the way, but still using your reach and your voice to just amplify their voices – creators who are people of color, and particularly Black people, Black artists, Black creators that I know and follow and love. And so I made an extra effort to share their work, and their voices, instead of my own.

LKH: A good friend said to me recently that if you care about these issues, and you have a platform, no matter how small, now is the time to use it.

ZF: Yes, I agree with that. I feel like I have a responsibility to spread as much useful information as I can.

LKH: You’ve always used your work that way, to draw attention to climate change.

ZF: Yes, that’s the main purpose of my work, and has been for many, many years. It’s unfortunate and frustrating that we all have to take our attention away from things that are important to focus on problems that should have been solved a long time ago.

And it all began when I first traveled to Greenland with my family in 2007. My mom was a landscape photographer, and she loved to travel to places that were really remote and far away. I traveled there with her before we were really talking about the climate crisis in the United States as much as we are now. So I had heard of climate change as a distant concept, but I really didn’t know much about it. But traveling to Greenland made it real. It completely opened my eyes. Because not only were there all these people staying at the same hotel who were involved in some way – like, scientists coming to study the ice, or journalists coming to write about it -- so that all the conversations we had within the walls of our hotel were about climate  change, but also, walking outside and meeting the locals, we’re hearing about how they’re having to adapt their lifestyle on practically a daily basis, and how they’re really at the forefront there, and they can see the changes every day.

And so, that just really opened my eyes to the crisis, and educated me. And I was already planning on making work about Greenland, but I shifted my focus specifically to the subject of climate change starting there. And then I haven’t stopped ever since! Because it’s a massive issue that needs addressing.

LKH: Now that you’re starting a family, has the issue of climate change become more urgent for you?

But yeah, I’ve always known that we’re doing this work for generations to come. It’s not something that can be put off any longer. Things are going quickly downhill now. The real problem is the sustainability of human beings on this planet. In the future it’s not going to be possible to live the way that we’re living now.

LKH: You work at such a large scale. How did the lockdown affect your artistic practice?

ZF: I had a lot of really big pieces that were halfway done in my studio [in Brooklyn]. And I was just coming home from Norway, where I was installing an exhibition that I curated on a National Geographic ship. I’d had to come home early from that trip, because Norway was contemplating closing its borders, and the US wasn’t letting in anyone from Europe. So I landed in New York, and I just decided to come straight upstate, where my boyfriend and I had just bought a house. We didn’t know when we bought that it would turn out to be perfect timing -- now we do.

And so, I stopped by the studio and threw a few small pieces in the car that I was working on. Which is rare for me, to work small-scale – like, I haven’t made something that would fit in the back of a Subaru in a really long time. But I’m getting ready for a solo show, and for this particular show, I just suddenly decided to make a few small pieces. So I threw those in the back of the car and that’s what I worked on during my first trimester, when I was mostly just lying on the couch. So, I very slowly managed to finish these four little drawings which should have taken me two weeks, and have instead taken me seven or eight! I’m preparing for a solo show with my gallery in Seattle. My exhibition has been moved, so the timeline I was on before has just completely shifted. It was supposed to open in July, and now it’s moved to September.

LKH: Tell me about the cruise ship installation for National Geographic.

ZF: Endurance is the name of the ship. I’ve been working with Lindblad and National Geographic for a bunch of years now; the first time I went to Antarctica was with them, aboard their NatGeo Explorer, and we decided this would be a good next project. I spent the last year curating art for the entire ship. It’s an exhibition called Change, and it will be all over the ship, and it’s multi-media, and a diverse group of artists, all making work about the polar regions and how they are impacted by the crisis.

It was planned before coronavirus really hit. So we started working out the show while I was there, and then I had to come home early; it got cut short. So Endurance is still just docked at the port, and I don’t know what will happen.

LKH: Before I go, how would you sum up your work and your mission?

ZF: I really do my best to recreate these landscapes that I have the opportunities to visit. They’re so far out and remote and really not a part of most people’s everyday experience and that makes climate change seem like such a faraway problem. But these places are real, and they are in peril. So I try to bring these remote places to as many people as I can in the hope that this will allow them a moment to maybe fall in love with them as I have. When you love something, you want to protect it. So that is my whole goal: to inspire people to want to preserve and protect these places.

From top to bottom:

Zaria in Greenland, photo by Drew Denny

Zaria at work on Disco Bay, Greenland, April 22nd, 2017, 60 x 92 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2019

Lincoln Sea, Greenland, 82° 32' 30.3036"N 59° 54' 50.3814"W, July 24th, 2017, 68 x 108 1/8 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2019

Lindblad Cove, Antarctica, November 22, 2018, 68 x 82 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2019

Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentina No. 11, 50 x 64.75 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2020

Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentina No. 1, 68 x 102 inches, soft pastel on paper, 2020

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