Talk for the Museums and Galleries Histories Group conference, Creating the Museum: Exploring the museum impulse in local, regional and national contexts
National Gallery, London. 26-27 September 2025
In recent years a number of new, experimental museums have emerged to address the issue of climate change and the climate crisis in different ways. These include the Climate Museum in New York, Climate Museum UK, the Klimaatmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Houston Climate Justice Museum. These emergent counter-institutions respond to particular social, economic and ecological contexts, but they all share a commitment to rethinking the purpose and function of museums in the face of ecological breakdown. Typically, such museums move away from static object-centred displays to prioritise community engagement, multi-media storytelling, and in-situ exhibitions and creative interventions. In this sense they rehearse some of the main strategies and agendas of eco-museums, which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s at a time when the environmental crisis was becoming an important part of museological discourse. At the same time, contemporary climate museums clearly address something quite different from early eco-museums, most notably bringing together the local and the planetary to confront the scale and urgency of the climate crisis through art and culture. Linking together these two moments of museum formation, this paper will argue that while emerging climate museums may seek to fundamentally shift museological praxis, their reliance on specific funding mechanisms, ways of working and stakeholder relationships greatly determines their scope to enact meaningful change.
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Colin Sterling 