Change: A Permanent Polar Art Exhibit

Exclusively Aboard National Geographic Endurance

The first-ever permanent ship-based art installation

Acclaimed artist Zaria Forman has assumed a ground-breaking curatorship—a definitive polar art exhibition aboard the world’s ultimate new polar expedition ship. She has assembled Change, the first-ever, permanent ship-based installation of drawings, paintings, video, photography, sculpture, and even soundscape by a wide range of artists dedicated to examining and expressing response to vulnerable polar geographies.

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Using each deck of the ship, Zaria has displayed works, including her own, which explore key themes—polar light, the intimate geometries of vast geographies, human history in polar regions, and more—to give our guests the richest polar experience possible. The beauty and grandeur of these fragile landscapes has been a source of inspiration for countless artists and explorers and now, those on board National Geographic Endurance will get the chance to experience the same.

Guided and self-guided ship-wide tours will be available for a more in-depth exploration of the art in both the public and private spaces of the ship.

Ice Crispies
03:51 min, collected in Errera Channel, Antarctica, 2015
Courtesy the artist, Zaria Forman

Click to listen to the sound of glacial ice melting, and the ancient air bubbles trapped inside of it breaking free. (Also the “whirring” sounds in the background are Gentoo penguins).

Themes & Artists of Change

Explore a sampling of the exhibition’s themes and artists whose work is on display.

Finding the Light

Light dramatically alters a landscape. A specific view observed at various times during one day can evoke completely different emotions. At the poles, the light shifts are more extreme than anywhere else because daylight can be ever-present or entirely absent. In the spring and fall, “golden hour” is all day long, and sunsets last for hours. These artists use innovative methods to embrace or manipulate light to create scenes and shapes that range from dreamy to eerie.

Reuben Wu

Reuben Wu is driven by a desire to explore new places as if they were unknown territories, constantly open to serendipity, with an eye for the unnoticed and the hidden. He uses drones and time-lapse photography to create light patterns in his photographs. His moody, otherworldly depictions of polar landscapes and glaciers evoke sublime romantic painting, and science fiction.

Virginia Wagner

Virginia Wagner makes paintings set in zones of conflict between human progress and the natural world. This tension plays out in the paint, as rigid grids contrast swampy pools and violent spills. The paintings she is developing for Change picture giant vertical pinnacles of ice under scaffolding, being mined, chopped up, and studied for human use.

Unexpected Perspectives

Visiting these icy regions by ship offers people one of the most dramatic and up-close perspectives of our rapidly changing planet. But the view itself is mostly limited to the landscape orientation; it is not often that we can see an iceberg from the air or from underwater. Discover a range of perspectives that provide a more holistic experience of the landscapes they are visiting, including the mesmerizing beauty of the polar sea floor and the cracks and crevasses of a glacier from an aerial viewpoint. While the message of any individual work may be abstract or literal, this series, taken together, will expand your orientation.

Eric Guth

Eric Guth is a photographer with extensive field experience in remote and polar regions. He is a naturalist with Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic and a field technician for James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey in Antarctica as well as glacier cave research in Oregon, Washington, Patagonia, and Greenland. His visually striking photographs give us a seldom-seen view of the underside of icebergs.

Zaria Forman

Zaria Forman has been making drawings that document climate change for the past 12 years. Most recently, she travelled with several NASA science missions to track shifting ice, producing a collection that faithfully captures the range of ephemeral landscapes she observed while flying just hundreds of feet over Antarctica and the Arctic. Like orbiting astronauts who are overcome by Earth’s fragility and moved to protect it, viewers are invited to witness a perspective on our planet that is connected to both the exacting beauty of science and the terrifying urgency of climate change.

Exploration & Enchantment

There are so many reasons why we are drawn to visit polar regions. The obvious draw of adventure and personal conquest; of testing our mettle amid unforgiving conditions. The search for knowledge, in which we seek to better understand the planet we all share. And then there’s the desire to escape from reality, to enter a terrain that is easy to describe as otherworldly, even though it’s actually as "worldly" as it gets. The works in this series explore the human experience of polar life and ask the viewer if our motivations to know these places change once we have been.

National Geographic

The National Geographic Society helped pioneer polar exploration. Change includes a collection of photographs from the society’s earliest polar expeditions, including Matthew Henson and Robert Peary’s expedition to the North Pole in 1909. Henson supposedly once said: “I think I’m the first man to sit on top of the world.” Indeed, it’s likely he was. Due to his race, unfortunately, this and his other contributions to polar exploration were largely ignored for nearly a century. There are myriad reasons why we are drawn to visit polar regions: adventure, testing our mettle amid unforgiving conditions, or seeking knowledge to better understand the planet we all share.

Julie Heffernan

Julie Heffernan's paintings, akin to Magical Realism, utilize a myriad of art historical references to present a sensual interior narrative, a self-allegory whose half-hidden political agenda is the literal background of the paintings. Excited to paint ice for the first time, Julie is developing a painting that will explore the Arctic’s geological past, when palm trees swayed under a warm sun.

John Sabraw

John Sabraw is an activist and environmentalist, with sustainability at the forefront of his creations. He collaborates with scientists and makes paint (that he uses) from iron oxide extracted in the process of remediating polluted streams. For Change, he will make polar, ocean and ice abstracted globes, overlaying with fine gold leaf maps of polar-arctic shipping lanes, exploration routes, and migratory routes.