48 hours before the People’s Climate March, DeSmogBlog ventured out to Brooklyn to see the preparation for what would become the largest climate march in history. (Check out some photos from the march itself.)
Artists from the around the country were quickly finishing their work in anticipation of march day — a day they’ve been waiting months for — all of them building floats, flying birds, an iceberg and painting banners… lots of banners.
We were able to interview a few of the artists and brought back a lot of photos of their work.
All this activity happened in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. Two spaces, just a block away from each other, created a tremendous amount of the art for the People’s Climate March on September 21st.
At one of the larger spaces in Brooklyn an artist paints a 20-foot circular banner calling for climate justice.
Dozens of sunglasses are painted with blue waves, signifying the rising seas.
An artist makes some final touches to the large iceberg float.
Roxana is putting wheat paste onto nearly life-size photo cutouts of migrant urban gardeners.
Curtis Mitchell is an artist with Heather Henson IBEX Puppetry, which built a nest float with bird kites to bring light to the issue of climate threats to migratory birds.
Watch an interview with Curtis Mitchell of IBEX Puppetry:
The tree/nest float leaves the studio space for a test drive. Everything seems to work out well, and luckily no cars presented any problems for them. It’s a four person operation on bicycles to move it and one person is inside the nest.
Chuck and Olivia took a three day train ride with 200 other activists, getting trainings along the way.
The Art Center where most of the banner and poster work was created was on several levels. There were people working social media and organizing in one room and most of the painting was going on upstairs or outside on the decks of this newer Brooklyn building.
While activists and artists packed the space, it was surprisingly well organized and many people were getting lessons on how to use tools.
