PROVIDENCE, R.I.—When Democrats convene in Denver for their national political convention later this month, Charlie Cannon will have a prime platform to discuss a favorite topic: the environment.
His new exhibit on creative “green” initiatives from around the world will be displayed just a short walk from the convention site. It’s included in a citywide collection of interactive art projects, known as Dialog:City, which is timed to coincide with the Democrats’ gathering.
The display “Partly Sunny: Designs to Change the Forecast” highlights roughly three dozen projects that Cannon says are innovative, but can also show people how to reduce their own energy use. Among them: a bike-sharing program in Paris and a Netherlands nightclub that generates electricity from dancing patrons.
Cannon, a designer, architect and adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, developed the project with a team of students. He said he wanted people to learn about international projects that are having success, amid all the gloomy predictions about climate change.
“Depending on how you look at the forecast, and depending on whether or not we can actually meet the challenges at hand, the forecast is at best partly sunny,” Cannon said, explaining the exhibit’s title. “But we wanted to be optimistic.”
The display opens Aug. 24 at the Denver Pavilions, a day before the convention starts at the nearby Pepsi Center, and will be up most of that week.
The projects will be displayed on large mounted paper boards, illustrated with photos and brief descriptions of how each works and its benefits. They’re grouped in a half-dozen categories, including food, land, buildings and energy.
One display board, for example, touts an organic city farm in Chicago that uses revitalized vacant plots of land to grow vegetables and make compost.
Other displays focus on the use of “green roofs” in the South Bronx, a carbon-offset program in San Francisco and a building near Aspen, Colo., that lacks a conventional heating system but heats itself through passive solar gain from a central greenhouse.
“We hope that it’s not a catalog of things that have been done so much as a series of ideas about what we could do, what could be done,” Cannon said.
Dialog:City is produced by the city of Denver and is not affiliated with the Democrats’ gathering. But Cannon said while he doesn’t consider his work a partisan statement, he does view it as “inherently political” since he believes government must be involved in any substantive environmental change.
“If we are to meet the challenges that we face, I believe what is required (are) … governmental-led initiatives, that are matched by and propelled by a kind of bottom-up, grass roots movement,” he said. “I don’t think you can have one without the other.”
The project is an outgrowth of a course Cannon taught at RISD last fall in which he challenged his students to design ways to limit global carbon emissions to levels that have been projected for 2015.
The topic had significance for Cannon, who credits a trip to Alaska after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill with spurring a passion for environmental issues.
The work caught the attention of Seth Goldenberg, the Dialog:City curator and a RISD alumnus who knew Cannon from having worked at RISD. He asked Cannon and his students to submit a proposal for the Denver event, and it was accepted.
The students collaborated with past participants in Cannon’s course, called the Innovation Studio, to identify environmental projects that should be included in the exhibit. They also worked with the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design to identify Colorado-based initiatives.
Goldenberg said “Partly Sunny” was especially fitting given the DNC’s stated goal of hosting the “greenest” convention ever. He also said it raised important questions about how art and design can influence policy discussions.
