Event name: Climate Art Workshop
Event time and place: Cambridge Community Center November 13, 2025
Summary of Event
Water Color Tree
For this semester’s excursion, I attended the Climate Art Workshop held for the University of Maryland Scholars program. The workshop talked about climate change and how the stresses of it can affect people. One way that they suggested to deal with climate change is through art. Using art as a strategy to relieve stress is a way for people to express themselves in a controlled manor while producing a visually powerful piece of art that can be reflected on by both the creator and others. As an example of the effects of climate art, the workshop walked us through three examples of guided art. These included a wheel segmented by how you feel toward your field of study and the changing climate, or another relevant topic. The second was a short book detailing a story on climate change in order to portray feelings relevant to the time. The third was a recycled watercolor piece of art made using recycled paint and canvas that was used to allow for free expression of personal feelings of the environment.
Activities
The main points of the climate art workshop were definitely convincing. They not only explained what climate art is, but they reinforced the ideas that they lectured us on with real life examples. On the right is one of the pieces that I made at the workshop which details a healthy tree. Although I am not the most talented artist, I was offered an opportunity to create something unique and exercise my creativity as I pleased. It is not often that opportunities like this come up, especially in the middle of the semester when so much other work is bogging me down. This art, although it may not seem like much, serves as a symbol of the mental break that this experience gave me. It allowed for me to stop worrying about all the responsibilities and deadlines that are constantly flying around my mind and spend a couple of hours having fun. I got to meet and talk to new people at this event and the lack of pressure to make the art perfect made the event very relaxing in comparison to the expectations of assignments. In addition to the focus on art as a coping strategy to reduce stress about climate change, the information shared on ways to get involved around campus in sustainability focused clubs and activities was encouraging. It shows that even though the data on climate change looks bad (as seen in the content of the SGC lectures) and current policies are not as extensive as the data shows they should be, there are still lots of people who care about the environment. It also shows that there are effective methods that are actively being worked on with the goal of reducing carbon emissions and waste from human activities. The speakers were a part of some of these clubs which helped to reinforce the idea that these projects are ongoing things that work and garner interest from students like me. I did not spot any logical fallacies in the climate art workshop. They brought up information that supported their claims including sources that say doing art has shown to help relieve stress about the climate. They also showed us that the results of their sources were repeatable by having us participate in climate art ourselves. Overall, this experience was a much-needed break from the academic stress of the semester and a valuable lesson that taught me a potential tool to help me deal with stress in the future. Not only can I apply the lessons of this workshop to coping with climate related stress, but I can also use the things I learned to cope with any sort of stress I may have. Thank you to the University of Maryland and the Scholars Program for sponsoring this workshop and giving me the opportunity to learn about stress management as well as the climate and what I can do about my feeling on it.
