For Jessica Taylor Bellamy, juxtapositions, transparency, and layers shape a way of working that evokes her family history and notions of home and landscape. Born to an Ashkenazi Jewish mother and an Afro-Cuban Jamaican father, Bellamy was raised in Whittier, just southeast of Los Angeles.

In glowing oil paintings, she draws from personal mementos like photographs, sales receipts, and newspaper clippings to explore the relationships between utopia and dystopia, humans and nature, image and text, and fantasy and reality.

Bellamy portrays sunsets, landscapes, trees, urban streets, flora, animals, and cloud formations in a kind of dreamy washiness, adding patterns like chainlink fences, gates, and lace curtains suggestive of boundaries. Horizontal landscapes overlaid with American Airlines tickets echo Andy Warhol’s 1960s silkscreen prints of SAS airline tickets merged with floral motifs.

“Bellamy’s observations are rooted in her experiences of the sprawling urban landscape of Los Angeles—a meeting of nature and civilization at the edge of a precarious paradise, formed by fire, drought, flood, and wind,” says a statement from Anat Ebgi, which represents the artist and opens her new solo exhibition, Temperature Check.

A few works shown here, like “Did She Nail It?,” appear in the show, which merges landscapes and atmospheric lighting effects with references to DIY culture, what’s gendered as “men’s work,” and car and motorcycle culture. The Home Depot receipt, which typically uses the slogan “Did we nail it?,” is combined with an image of a rear-view mirror depicted so close that it initially appears abstract.

Bellamy examines the dualities and precarity of life in Southern California—a seeming paradise we’ve witnessed can be swiftly devastated by fire and drought. The title Temperature Change is also a double entendre, suggesting meteorological readings and a figurative expression used when measuring a group mood or opinion. Through surreal imagery and echoes of mass production and consumerism, the artist invokes a noir reverie.

Temperature Check runs from February 8 to March 22 in Los Angeles. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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Verdant scenery inhabited by vibrant wildlife and graceful feminine figures center in the work of Rupy C. Tut, whose paintings (previously) draw upon her Sikh ancestry and experiences emigrating from India as a young girl. “As an environmentalist and Indian-American woman, she never takes place for granted,” says a statement from Jessica Silverman Gallery, which represents the artist.

Tut’s ethereal works tread the boundaries between abstraction, portraiture, pattern, and traditional Indian painting. Her compositions introduce narratives—often captivatingly mysterious—that highlight enigmatic mystical, elemental, and spiritual phenomena.

The artist’s subjects typically exist front-and-center, like in “A River of Dreams,” in which a figure sits in a stream and observes a lily while dark clouds move in above. Motifs of darkening skies and dramatic change continue in recent works like “Bursting with Clouds” and “The First Rain.”

Oscillating between idyllic paradises, anxieties around climate disasters, and gender constraints, Tut focuses on female figures, turning the tables on a genre that typically focuses on male achievements. “I question traditional roles and labels while preserving traditional practices,” she says.

Tut was a 2024 recipient of the Joan Mitchel Foundation Fellowship, and her work is on view in the group exhibition About Place at San Francisco’s de Young through the end of November. You can explore more on her website and Instagram.

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After ending another year of record-breaking climate statistics, we stand at the precipice of 2025, which has already revealed its own devastating challenges. As the window for meaningful change continues to narrow during the next several years, we’re left to wonder what the world might look like if we stay on this path. Through the lens of hyper-consumerism, San Francisco-based artist Michael Kerbow (previously) envisions the future in his wry and imaginative landscape paintings.

Swarming decayed gas station roofs, perching atop abandoned vehicles in forests, and sauntering past crumbling highways and fast food joints, the dinosaurs in Kerbow’s paintings govern a world overrun by the effects of late-stage capitalism. Hints of climate devastation reveal themselves through small details in the background, such as volcano eruptions, dense, hazy skies, and pools of floodwater.

Kerbow scatters familiar signage and advertisements from recognizable chains within his scenes to introduce humor and make his work more approachable. However, the artist emphasizes the gravity of the issue at hand:

We like to believe everything we currently have will always be there for us, but I suspect it could just as easily fall apart and slip away.  I try to stay optimistic about the future, but the truth is I am troubled by where I see things appear to be headed, specifically with the health of our ecosystem. Each passing year seems to bring more alarming statistics, and this comfortable place we call home seems to grow more precarious.  It is sobering to consider my artwork as foreshadowing a future reality.

As Kerbow continues to make new paintings, you can follow along on Instagram and see his website for more.

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Have you ever thought about how your bacon, almond milk, or fish ends up on your table? In our globalized economy, fresh fruit can be shipped from one hemisphere to another to stock grocery store shelves regardless of the season, and many of us enjoy nearly endless choices of cereals, vegetables, meats, and snacks. But a striking number of young children don’t realize that processed foods like chicken nuggets and cheese don’t come from plants. How does a hot dog come to be? Where does our food come from?

Photographer George Steinmetz offers a remarkable look at landscapes, initiatives, and customs that shape how the world eats. His new book, Feed the Planet, chronicles a decade spent documenting food production in more than three dozen countries on six continents, including 24 U.S. states.

More than 40 percent of our planet’s surface has been molded and tended to produce crops and livestock. From idiosyncratic 16th-century farm plots in rural Poland to Texas cattle feed lots to a large-scale shrimp processing operation in India, food production is rarely observed on this scale. “He takes us places that most of us never see, although our very lives depend on them,” says a statement for the book.

Studies have shown that large-scale agriculture and factory farming send greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in an amount constituting nearly one-third of all human-caused emissions. The ongoing climate crisis can be traced in large part to fertilizers that release nitrous oxide; deforestation caused by farm expansion that adds more carbon dioxide into the air; and emissions from manure management, burning, fuel use, and more.

From a striking aerial vantage point, Steinmetz captures the beauty, ingenuity, and stark reality of factories, aquaculture, family farms, food pantries, and sprawling agricultural operations. He elucidates how staples like wheat, rice, vegetables, fruits, meat, and fish reach both domestic and international tables, tapping into “one of humanity’s deepest needs, greatest pleasures, and most pressing challenges.”

Purchase a signed copy on the photographer’s website, or grab one on Bookshop.

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Home to more than 40,000 plant species, 1,300 kinds of birds, and millions of insects, the Amazon is a vital and increasingly threatened part of our global ecosystem. By highlighting the incredible diversity and beauty of nature and wildlife around the planet, Vital Impacts (previously) raises funds for the preservation of the rainforest through its annual print sale.

This year, in addition to the fundraiser featuring work by more than 80 photographers, the program has launched the “Saving the Monarchs” campaign, showcasing the work of award-winning National Geographic photographer Jaime Rojo. “With the Monarch butterfly population declining by 90 percent in recent decades, efforts are underway to protect their habitats and ensure their survival,” says a statement from Vital Impacts.

Rojo has spent two decades photographing the magnificent insects, tracing their annual migration across the length and breadth of North America. Wintering in Mexico—or California for those west of the Rocky Mountains—the iconic butterflies return north in the summertime, where they typically lay a single egg on a milkweed plant.

Depending on the temperature, the egg cycle lasts for three to five days, after which a small larva emerges. As it grows, it sheds its skin a number of times, developing recognizable black, white, and yellow stripes. Then, once full grown, the larva spins a silk mat, stabs a stem into the mat to hang from, and encapsulates itself inside a pupa. After around eight to fifteen days, the adult Monarch emerges with bright orange and black wings.

During the summer, Monarchs live between two and five weeks, but if they hatch later in the year, they complete an incredible journey south, where they overwinter in clusters on trees in warmer climates. These adults will then live just long enough to hatch new eggs so future generations can return to the northernmost breeding grounds.

Monarch populations have declined in recent decades due to myriad factors, from the destruction of milkweed—the only plant on which they lay eggs—and overwintering habitats to temperature changes and drought due to the ongoing climate crisis. Initiatives like Monarch Watch, which this fundraiser benefits, emphasize conservation, track colonies’ movements, and promote education.

Many prints in this year’s sale start at $100, with options for different sizes and striking limited editions. Sixty percent of profits are earmarked to support Monarch conservation through Monarch Watch and FOCEN.

The remaining 40 percent of proceeds further the efforts of “the storytellers who are committed to shining a light on these critical issues and driving positive change in our world” via donations to COICA, an international program dedicated to the support of 511 Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon Basin.

See more of Rojo’s work on his website, and purchase prints in this year’s sale, which continues through January 31.

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Where do jets go when they no longer fly? What happens to shipping containers when they aren’t useful anymore for cargo? The answer is invisible to most of us, but for Cássio Vasconcellos, abandoned trains, planes, and automobiles are far from forgotten.

For more than four decades, the São Paolo-based artist has been fascinated by the relationship between humans and the landscape. Over the years, his work has captured dramatic impressions of sprawling cities around the globe, often from the air, spurring an ongoing series called Collectives that condenses details of urban infrastructure like highways and parking lots into sprawling, all-over compositions.

Collectives 2, to which these images belong, focuses solely on the mesmerizing—and mind-boggling—quantity of scrapped vehicles and metal indefinitely parked in nondescript places. Vasconcellos draws from tens of thousands of aerial photographs he has made of junkyards, scrap heaps, airplane graveyards, and dumps to create remarkable, large-scale composite images.

The artist has mapped all of the junkyards around São Paolo, plus numerous more near the Brazilian cities of Cubatão, Santos, and Rio de Janeiro. He has also documented desert landscapes in the U.S. that serve as final resting places for commercial airliners and military jets.

“Over,” for example, considers numerous associated meanings, like “overview,” “all-over,” “overdose,” or “game over.” The title references not only excess but the overflow of visual information in contemporary society.

“Seeing an image like this is to make clear that there is no ‘throw away,'” Vasconcellos says in a video about “OVER,” which took him about a year and three months to complete. “This volume of things that are in the work… they are out there,” he adds. “I just put them together.”

“These photos may look like post-apocalyptic scenarios, but they could be our future,” the artist says in a statement. “We still have to learn that by throwing things away and taking them out of our sight, we don’t make them
disappear. In fact, they keep existing somewhere else, outliving us most
of the time.”

Vasconcellos cuts out individual shipping containers, trucks, dumpsters, and piles of detritus in a meticulous and time-consuming digital process. He never repeats an element in a composition, and each piece is scaled and situated so that the shadows align with the directionality of the light. He then adds dust and dirt to the surfaces, simultaneously emphasizing the patina of time and an eerie sense of timelessness.

Devoid of people, Vasconcellos’s images nevertheless describe the human predilection to produce, consume, and cast aside. “It’s kind of nonsense, because there are some paths, but you don’t really understand how a person or a car can get in there—or get out,” Vasconcellos says. “It is a possible world, but at the same time, an absurd one.”

Vasconcellos is represented by Nara Roesler Gallery, and you can explore more of his work on his website and Instagram.

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From crunched, single-use containers to thrifted boxes and repurposed clocks, Stéphanie Kilgast (previously) devises unique habitats for a wide range of creatures. Fungi takes root along the sides of a green bottle as a beetle crawls over the cap in “Weevil Wander,” for example, and a violet owl alights on the top of a pair of binoculars.

Kilgast’s solo exhibition, LUSCIOUS LEGACY at Arch Enemy Arts, continues the artist’s interest in highlighting the human impact on the environment and the increasingly grim consequences of the climate crisis. Rather than focusing on the darker reality, she adopts an optimistic view of nature’s resilience.

“My work touches very contrasting emotions: the joy of color and natural beauty but also the sadness and despair of where we are headed,” Kilgast says. She hopes to aid us in questioning mass consumerism and its resulting trash, which continues to threaten delicate ecosystems worldwide, and adds, “The world is beautiful. It is worth fighting for.”

LUSCIOUS LEGACY runs through October 27 in Philadelphia. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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From thousands of plastic bags, nets, and hanks of yarn, Indonesian artist Mulyana (previously) illuminates the fragility of marine ecosystems.

In his solo exhibition Remembering Our Collective Future at Sapar Contemporary, the artist has incorporated recyclable materials and distilled the palette to white, evoking a symbol of purity and drawing attention to the consequences of human impact on our oceans, such as coral bleaching.

Curated by John Silvis, the show invites viewers to reflect on the effects of the climate crisis and the critical importance of environmental preservation. Photographs by Ign Raditya Bramantya highlight a living, breathing embodiment of coral as it traverses the city streets, bringing the ocean to daily life.

Mulyana painstakingly twists, knots, and wraps plastic netting, cable wire, and plastic yarn into sculptures and wall hangings resembling coral and cartoonish sea creatures.

Running concurrently at the Charles B. Wang Center at SUNY Stony Brook, an exhibition of the artist’s vibrant yarn works showcases costumes and characters inspired by marine life. Yarnscapes: Mulyana’s Environmental Tapestries presents a playful counterpoint to the monochrome pieces, nevertheless urging us to remember and evaluate our relationship to our oceans.

Remembering Our Collective Future runs from October 22 to November 20 in New York City, coinciding with Yarnscapes in Stony Brook through December 10. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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At 36 Boundary Street in London, a bold new mural rises 15 feet above the street. Anchored by scales atop a small seedling, the public artwork by Shepard Fairey addresses environmental justice and our responsibility to care for the planet.

“I believe that our individual and collective actions will dramatically impact current and future generations, be it for the better or for the worse. It is our responsibility as the citizens of Earth to protect it,” the artist said.

A series of workshops with young Londoners inspired the bright, graphic motif. The group was interested in expanding access to green space and reducing air pollution, and given the recent convening of the United Nations General Assembly focusing on international cooperation, connection between countries and cultures was top of mind.

The project was produced by Charlotte Pyatt, Simon Butler, and Migrate Art, which has raised more than £2.1 million in the last decade through creative projects in refugee camps in France and Northern Iraq, with the Indigenous Xingu people in the Amazon, and in collaboration with U.K.-based charities feeding London’s unhoused population.

Find more from the artist on his website.

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Around the world, rising temperatures and ecosystem imbalances due to the climate crisis have spurred an increasing number of wildfires annually. Brazil, for example, has seen more than 180,000 hot spots this year as of mid-September, the most since 2010. As deforestation reduces rainfall, a catastrophic cycle of drought and wildfires has only strengthened.

For Eduardo Kobra, the unprecedented number of uncontrolled blazes spurred a new series of artworks drawing attention to this troubling reality. As fires impacted rural and urban areas alike, including the city of Araçariguama—a little more than 30 miles from São Paulo—the artist chose a local area scorched by flames to document a collection of temporary interventions.

Drawing attention to the wildlife and habitats being destroyed, Kobra portrays birds, monkeys, anteaters, and other creatures surrounded by burned forest. In one piece, a firefighter assists a baby jaguar, and in another—a sign of hope—a child waters a sprouting plant.

Kobra is known for his large-scale murals on buildings around the world, which emphasize vibrant portraits and nods to pop culture through characteristically bright, geometric patterns. Using biodegradable materials, his new series of cutout panels uses a relatively smaller scale to address an enormously critical issue.

See more on his website and Instagram.

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