The watercolors, woodcuts, and photos lining the brewery walls tell stories of our changing climate: melting glaciers, wildfires, species on the brink.
They are stories that have become all too common at galleries and pop-ups like this one that check all the right cultural boxes: important issue, hip venue, food truck with sustainable options. But this isn’t Brooklyn or Silver Lake. The crowd looks straight out of the backwoods because most of its members actually are.
This is Fairbanks, Alaska, where many of the artists represented here have spent this hot summer day slogging through tussocks and hiking to field sites with paint and canvas, hoping not to stumble on a bear but far more afraid of hungry mosquitoes (the real terror here). The folks at the brewery are mainly climate artists and climate scientists—sometimes both—a statement in itself in a time when the government is denying the very change they’re capturing. Many work at Toolik Field Station, 370 miles north, one of the longest-running Arctic research stations in the United States and ground zero for a program that pairs artists with scientists.
But with federal funding going the way of the dodo, this program may be on borrowed time.
That’s why, as the midnight sun blazes on, people are washing away their worries at the bar. The boreal forest is burning and the tundra is warming in Alaska, a place where you don’t just hear about change—you see it. “More each season,” says Mary Beth Leigh, a dancer turned microbiologist who just hopped off a prop plane, her regular commute from studying an oil spill in a remote Native village.
Many locals say that Toolik—and the art made in the tundra—is crucial to communicating to the rest of the world what’s happening here.
“There’s this feeling up north. It’s hard to describe,” says John Jodwalis, holding a beer as he stands in front of his psychedelic pastel rendering of the Brooks Range, the mountains dividing forest from flats. “It’s unlike anywhere else. It’s special. And changing so fast.”
How fast? Towns are falling into the ocean, and sinkholes are common. The thawing permafrost releases ancient microbes that alter rivers, animals—and us. The more the ground melts, the more heat it absorbs, feeding a cycle of rising temperatures and accelerating melt. This is what climate change looks like in the U.S. Arctic.
For researchers and artists, it’s a deadly and transfixing change they can’t help but witness.
“You have to be into the wilderness to be here,” says David Mollett, who moved to Alaska at 10, studied at Oregon’s Reed College, exhibited in New York, and then returned. The 75-year-old firefighter turned fine artist recalls glaciers he’s painted that have since significantly melted and tells stories that sound romantic until you hear their warning.
Like about the time on a painting-and-camping trip when a grizzly shredded his canvas while he was off on a hike. “Bears are curious,” he says, shrugging, as Jodwalis, a former river guide, shrugs back.
Grizzlies moving farther north might seem cool to a city dweller who’s never seen one, but it’s another climate signal. Trees are pushing north, too, thanks to longer summers and shorter winters. And with trees come bark beetles that turn trees into timber and beavers that dam waterways into stagnant lakes, which release mercury and create more open water to absorb, which increases melt.
When you hear all that, Mollett’s landscapes suddenly feel more urgent.
What happens here affects weather patterns thousands of miles away. Jessie Hedden, a local painter, printmaker, and sculptor, hopes this fact will be better communicated if people feel something when they see this work on exhibit. “Maybe that way people do something,” says Klara Maisch, a wilderness guide and visual artist who teaches natural history at Toolik and paints on glaciers in the winter. “This is an important place, and we just want to protect it.”
A Long Road North
Getting to Toolik isn’t easy. “From Fairbanks, it’s a 10-hour drive on gravel roads from the boreal forest,” says Brian Barnes, Toolik’s honorary science codirector. En route, you cross the Yukon River “through the Brooks Range, into the North Slope, where no plants grow higher than three feet.”
It’s also beautiful—remote enough that wolves sometimes wander nearby and caribou pass through camp, a rare intact ecosystem that’s vital to understanding fire, ice, and life on the edge of the world. In summer, the sun never sets, offering near-perfect conditions for fieldwork and painting alike. “You can be out all day drawing, come back to camp, eat dinner,” says Jodwalis. “[Then] you draw more.”
Since 1975, Toolik has hosted dozens of writers, historians, and illustrators, many of whom have teamed with geologists and glaciologists. “A lot of people feel science is cut-and-dried, boring,” says Syndonia Bret-Harte, the station’s science director. “But art moves people, and scientists are motivated by curiosity.”
Toolik offers year-round workshops and residencies and regularly hosts visiting artists like Leigh, who leads In a Time of Change, a program inspired by her work here.
“Working with scientists has changed how I see the world,” says Ree Nancarrow, a fiber artist who describes a “deeper understanding” of nature after spending time at Toolik.
She calls her wall quilts, one of which was featured in the 2023 National Climate Assessment, “a visual interpretation” of bacterial studies of lakes and streams. It sounds weird, but the pieces are beautiful: dots and French knots representing the locations of bacterioplankton, woven into glowing patterns.
Toolik’s collaborations can even shape research. Traditional equipment can’t always track how water moves underground, but Brooklyn visual and acoustic artist Nikki Lindt’s ultrasensitive microphones capture the sounds of thawing 10,000-year-old permafrost. That can help researchers by also tracking the release of methane, a deadly gas that can trap 25 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
For Barnes, the exchange is simple. “It lets us tell the world about what we do here,” he says. “Fifty years of year-round studies on plant and animal change.” Other Arctic stations shut down in winter, but not Toolik. Even at 40 below, the work goes on.
When not sharing his passion for ground squirrels—they can enter a brain-dead state while hibernating—the biologist sounds like a proud parent as he discusses art’s value for science. “From dance to music to visual arts, the benefit is showing and telling science to large audiences,” he says. “In a time when you pick up a newspaper and see how they’re going after people for their beliefs, especially science, that’s important.”
Imperfect Future
As the alcohol flows at the brewery and lips get looser, the talk turns to money.
No one is here to get rich, not off Toolik. They just want to study and to create. But Toolik runs on fragile support: A fraction of its budget comes from University of Alaska donations and other grants (the entire residency program costs just $1,000, which covers room, board, and travel for two visiting artists), and most of its operating costs are covered by a five-year, $19.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation, itself facing massive cuts.
What if Washington axes the arts program? In this era of the politics of revenge, even small programs can become targets. Arctic sea ice has hit record lows, yet Washington remains hard at work weakening and scrapping more than 100 environmental rules. Climate has become a dirty word. Some researchers here decline to give their names, fearing retaliation from agencies that are attacking and retracting their work.
That makes Toolik a critical habitat. For migrating caribou, yes—the station is not far from the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve and the 19-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, both overseen by the Bureau of Land Management and now open to drilling and mining. But also for migrating research fellows and plucky painters. A place where stories, not just data, are preserved in a forgotten corner of America.
“I always thought I was living in the worst of times,” says Barnes, remembering Nixon and Reagan. Then he asks me, “Will we survive?” He pauses, lips tight, watching kids play with puppies as parents laugh over food truck bites.
The world is changing, whether Washington admits it or not. And the people here will keep going, no matter what comes.
“What happens next?” Barnes asks, donning a pair of sunglasses, his face settling into a wry smile. “I don’t know. But change is constant, isn’t it?”•
Adam Popescu is a writer in Los Angeles and writes frequently about our changing planet. He loves Alaska. So much so that he once backpacked 60 miles in the Arctic: He was dropped off by a prop plane, didn’t see a single person—or a single tree—for a week, lost a shoe, lost 10 pounds, and didn’t post any photos on social media. It was the best trip of his life.
