Global Centre for Climate Action presents: Art and Planetary Crisis

Join us for an illuminating lecture with Christine Shaw, an innovative curator whose work navigates the urgent intersections of art, society, and policy. Christine Shaw serves as Director and Curator of The Blackwood (University of Toronto Mississauga), Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies at UTM, and Research Fellow in Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT.

With a legacy of large-scale, multi-year curatorial projects, Shaw has redefined the possibilities for art to act as a transformative force in the face of complex, overlapping crises. Her projects amplify voices, reimagine collaborative processes, and push boundaries in ways that are both artistically resonant and civically impactful. Through her work, Shaw has facilitated collaborations involving hundreds of contributors, creating exhibitions that have inspired real policy shifts and opened new horizons for societal care, critical reflection, and environmental stewardship.

In this session, Shaw will delve into landmark projects such as Take Care (2016–2019), a pivotal series that engaged over 250 artists, activists, curators, and researchers in exploring the global crisis of care, and The Work of Wind (2015–2024), a project that uses the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force as a metaphor for examining systems of power, extraction, and environmental impact. Shaw's curatorial approach invites us to consider art not just as a mirror, but as a medium of activism and systems change, capable of addressing the urgent, systemic challenges we face as a global community.

Currently, Shaw is leading GROUP PROBLEMS: Learning to Live Together at Scale (2021–2031), an ambitious, decade-long endeavor that seeks to reimagine how we coexist amidst growing crises. With guiding principles like Do it Together, Let’s Get in Formation, Remember the Future, Pay Attention, and Acknowledge Interdependency, this project tackles the pressing question: How can we build an art practice that doesn’t merely represent crises but actively participates in solutions?

This event is a unique opportunity to learn from a curator who understands the transformative role of art in an era of poly-crises and to consider how we might all contribute to meaningful change at scale.

is Director/Curator of The Blackwood, Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and Research Fellow in Art, Culture, Technology at MIT. Her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and speculative ecologies has been applied to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care, an exhibition series co-organized with Greig de Peuter involving over 250 contributors critically engaging the crisis of care (2016–2019) and The Work of Wind (2015–2024), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force. While the project’s title might suggest a weather project, the curatorial concern was not to make a project about wind, but to better understand the forces of composition and decomposition predicated on extraction, dispossession, accumulation, and infrastructure. Currently, she is developing GROUP PROBLEMS: Learning to Live Together at Scale (2021–2031). Through five imperatives—Do it Together, Let’s Get in Formation, Remember the Future, Pay Attention, and Acknowledge Interdependency—this major project will attend to the collective aporias of contemporary society to articulate the problems that will in turn shape this epoch of transformation. She is founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–2024) and co-editor of the two-volume book series The Work of Wind (2018, 2024).

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

113 McCaul St, MCC 530, 113 McCaul Street, Toronto, Canada