Artist As Citizen: Judge Our Climate Contest

I'm the co-founder of a project first announced in Huffington Post, called Artist As Citizen. We connect art students with donors to help them create projects on social issues. There has been quite a gap in my posting here, but we have been busy.

Now, we have a project that needs your input:

Over the summer, we set a couple of dozen creative students the task of describing the risk from climate change, as framed in the most recent IPCC and MIT reports. They were allowed to work as broadly or narrowly with the concepts as they liked, but had to be grounded in the scientific sources.

Four finalists were selected by Ji Lee, creative director at Google Creative Lab, and they are now up on the New York Times science blog Dot Earth, where readers can vote for the winner. The first four comments on Dot Earth work as the ballot, and you choose your entry by clicking 'recommend.' (The prize, from us, is $2,000.) Note that the Times requires first-time visitors to register to enter comments, but it only takes a moment.

It would be great to get more voters and more feedback to help learn what works best, as communication on this subject is the central challenge of the next few years. We have plenty of bright students to work with; now we're waiting to hear what you think.

Here are the entries:

Extinct
D. Kim, Parsons School of Design, B.F.A., Communication Design, 2009

Tracing Emissions
T. Holliday, S. Reagin, Pratt Institute, both M.Arch., 2011

Climate Change
M. Shapiro, New York University, B.F.A. Film, 2011

Thin Ice
M. Drennan, School of Visual Arts, M.F.A., Photography, 2009

To vote, via Dot Earth, click here.

Thank you for your thoughts, and look for more projects coming soon.