Almost daily over the past two decades, we’ve been hearing about climate change – when we experience a heat wave, when we witness a wildfire, when we see on the news an arctic blast on the East Coast, or when we learn about melting icebergs in the Antarctic Ocean. Yet this phenomenon didn’t just happen in the last 20 years, or even during our lifetime, as the “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of our Climate Change” exhibition at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens demonstrates. On view through Jan. 6, 2025 at the Marylou and George Boone Gallery, it will be on display concurrently with “Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China.” Photo by May S. Ruiz / Hey SoCal The two shows are part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a regional event presented by Getty featuring more than 70 exhibitions and programs that explore the intersections of art and science, past and present. Its title originates from a series of lectures given by British writer and art critic John Ruskin in 1884. In “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,” he conveyed concern over the changing appearance of the English sky caused by the smoke generated by coal-fired factories. A pair of drawings that illustrates his “Storm Cloud” lecture – Thunderclouds, Val d’Aosta (1858) and Cloud Study: Ice Clouds over Coniston (1880) – is on loan to the exhibition from the Ruskin Museum and Research Centre at Lancaster University (U.K.). Ruskin made drawings of the sky throughout his life. These records of his observations helped him understand how the appearance of the sky had changed due to industrial pollution. Arthur Severn after John Ruskin Thunderclouds, Val d’ Aosta; Cloud Study: Ice Clouds over Coniston. | Photo by May S. Ruiz / Hey SoCal […]