At the Houston Climate Justice Museum and Cultural Center, we think critically about what it means to be a "museum" and its associated functions of collection, display, public, humanity. We think hard about borders - geographic, economic, and social - that divide our communities. We know that looking is always perspectival: we ask What can be seen and how? By whom? And when? Here at the HCJMCC we display objects as sites for productive disagreement and social conflict, as a way to bring people together and work to solve our intractable environmental crises.
We often found that museums perpetuated cultural versions of nature that were tied to upper class values and dubious racial theories. So we came up with the idea that if we want to tackle the environmental crisis, we have to change the way that museums operate; we have to be more experimental, creative, and open ended. And, we have to unabashedly focus on ethical questions when looking at art and science: Who benefits from this image or object? What point of view does it take? Who is represented and how?
We try to foreground fragile ecological relations in climate justice, and to radically rethink what a museum does and who we do this with. Our attitudes about nature greatly inform the actions we take, and our cultural institutions have the responsibility to examine the legacies of colonialism and racism entrenched in their own practices as well as in the industries that fund them. We work to be in coalition with community partners in order to clear room for values that are more reflective of our collective lived experiences. The climate crisis demands that we confront our existing social institutions while also constructing alternative worlds.
Co-Director and Co-Founder of Houston Climate Justice Museum
Co-Director of Organizing and Research at West Street Recovery
Co-Founder of Northeast Action Collective
Co-Director and Co-Founder of Houston Climate Justice Museum
Co-Director of Operations & Rebuild Efforts, and Community Organizing at West Street Recovery
Senior Portfolio Advisor, Renewables & Energy Solutions - Americas, Shell USA
Department of History, University of Houston
Co-founder of the Graduate Certificate in Global Energy, Development, and Sustainability at the University of Houston
