Kathryn Williamson – Climate Women

This exhibition round includes works provided by Kathryn Williamson which will be on view in the First Floor Ramp Gallery from July 16 - September 20, 2025.  Lowe Mill A&E invites patrons and art lovers to join us for Open Studio Night, a building-wide experience when our over 150 studios will be open to the public.  The evening also includes receptions for all seven of our gallery spaces. This series gives the public a chance to meet and interact with visiting artists and discuss their work as it is on display and available for purchase. Come out, enjoy a pleasant evening, and maybe you’ll find that special piece of art that speaks to you!  The Open Studio Night reception is Saturday, September 20 from 5-7 pm.

About the exhibit:

I believe that healing the climate is connected with healing ourselves, which includes listening to those small seeds of yearning we have, to share ourselves and live out loud from our passions. I always loved astrophysics and art, and the climate crisis asks me to bring both the scientific and artistic parts of myself forward to be more whole. I’ve spent much of the last decade as an academic, an astronomy educator, hardly painting at all. This “Climate Women” series is a gift to myself. It has accompanied a larger shift in my life of transitioning from academia to independent consulting, from frantic rushing to being more intentional with my time, and from following rigid perceptions of what a “professional” does to listening more to the messy, creative parts of myself. Painting these women while listening to recordings of them speaking on stage or in interviews has become a meditation practice for me to listen, learn, create, and connect.

I originally started this series by painting authors from the book All We Can Save, but since the book has about fifty authors, I started to bounce around. In no particular order, I just followed my whims for topics that caught my eye. I expanded to women I know personally and/or learned about through other efforts. I have many more portraits I’d like to paint, and I made more paintings for this series than I’m sharing in public. This is for a few important reasons. The first has to do with consent. A big part of this effort is the practice of respect and reciprocity. I vowed from the beginning that I would only display the paintings if I received explicit permission. There are a handful of women I painted who I was not able to reach, and it was not for lack of trying! For example, I can see that a few of the women are extremely busy taking brave actions, and after brief attempts to contact them, I thought it might be best to just let them be so they can focus. Others seem to have totally disappeared from contact. It gives me a sinking feeling. I wonder, why? Did their activism bring them into harm’s way? Are they okay? There is only one painting where I got an explicit “not at this time” response. There is also one painting that is just bad; I’m too embarrassed to share it with anyone. It was one of the first ones I started, and I could feel myself rushing, trying to “accomplish” the big task ahead. I keep it as a reminder to take my time and prioritize investing in process and quality. Then there are the paintings where I did invest careful attention to detail, and I’m very proud of the resulting quality, and I still couldn’t reach the woman depicted, so I sit with that feeling of not getting what I thought I wanted, without getting that external validation. And that, too, is a learning practice for me.

This collection is not at all representative of the many women who show up to help make a better world. In general, compared to men, women are more likely to recognize climate change as a serious problem, more concerned global climate change will harm them personally, and believe that people will have to make major lifestyle changes to reduce the effects of global climate change (Pew Research Global Attitudes Survey 2015). While women suffer disproportionately from resource scarcity and natural disasters resulting from climate change, women also hold significant community and ecological knowledge, can mobilize households, and can safeguard health measures such as sanitation and forest regeneration. This is why gender equity is listed as one of the key United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Whether you are inspired by the women featured in this collection, other women helping their communities, and/or all the awesome non-women activists out there helping to envision and generate a healthy, equitable, and sustainable future, I hope you find your unique role in the climate movement. We need everyone. We need you!

Original paintings are not for sale. See ursagaia.com if you would like to purchase a 18x24-inch mosaic poster print of the collection. Proceeds will be donated to the All We Can Save Project.