Sustainability work teeters on the precipice between hope and doom: what’s at stake is so precious, and what threatens it so ominous and complex, that it can be difficult to visualize. For this issue’s cover, we turned to a Minnesota artist whose work deftly navigates this balance. Gregory Euclide creates installations, sculptural relief works, and paintings using media from watercolor and cut paper to found objects—in this case plant matter from the Cowling Arboretum.
A fine artist known for his work for the band Bon Iver, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and others, Euclide focused the front cover on campus efforts: we see wind turbines, the decommissioned steam plant, and new Passive House buildings. The back cover alludes to the other networks of sustainability we connect with: schools, governments, and tribal communities working to address climate change.
