Each year, the nonprofit media organization Grist searches high and low for the most inspiring innovators and do-ers working on fresh solutions to the planet’s biggest problems. The result is a collection of 50 Fixers working to build a sustainable world that works for everyone. We are thrilled that NHM’s Narrative Change Director Julian Brave Noisecat and Executive Director Beka Economopoulos were both named in this year’s Grist 50 round-up of top fifty environmental leaders.
The Natural History Museum was a finalist for an international “Oscar for Museums” by the Leading Culture Destination Awards in Berlin, co-sponsored by The New York Times and UK-based Lord Consulting, the world’s largest museum consultancy. The award recognizes a museum or large-scale public art project that has made a significant contribution to the fight against climate change. Past winners have included The Science Express in India, Climarte in Melbourne, The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, PA, and England’s Manchester Museum.
We’re honored to have been selected from more than 4,000 applicants for the prestigious 2020 Creative Capital Award to develop “The Supreme Court of Red Natural History”, a collaboration with the Native Organizers Alliance, the Center for Anthropocene Studies at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and Dutch artist Jonas Staal. This exhibition and multi-day “People’s Tribunal”–a participatory event used by grassroots communities to hold institutions, industries, and states accountable–will assemble Native leaders, environmentalists, scientists, and scholars within a replica of the U.S. Supreme Court chambers to put natural history and its colonial legacy “on trial”, enforcing the recognition of a split–a ruling of sorts–between the extractivist history of natural history and a natural history that actively challenges the logic of nature-as-resource. It culminates with the formation of an alliance that can create impact beyond the duration of the exhibition, furthering the possibility of a natural history for the future. Read more about it here.
