Fredonia art professor awarded grant for global warming awareness project

Timothy Frerichs, professor of Art at Fredonia, has received one of three Global Warming Art Project grants that will support projects that respond to the rising dangers of global warming and climate change.

“Navigation: Lake Erie – Great Lakes,” Mr. Frerichs’ project, will create a traveling exhibition and installation, with accompanying workshops and lectures that address how climate change is impacting the Great Lakes, with a focus on Lake Erie.

“The Great Lakes are ‘great.’ They are an enormous and complex system with a role in our lives that is tangible, abstract and certainly profound. My project navigates the significant environmental, economic and cultural consequences of climate change to Lake Erie,” Frerichs explained.

The installation will feature a group of varying-sized works on paper alongside a video and artist book. “I am striving to visualize and mentally grasp the complex implications and scale of the change occurring to Lake Erie and the Great Lakes,” Frerichs said.

Workshops and lectures will offer direct approaches to address and counter these impacts and changes. The exhibition will be held at multiple venues along Lake Erie and possibly other Great Lakes locations. Frerichs is also excited to have already been invited to install and exhibit “Navigation: Lake Erie – Great Lakes” in Turkey.

“The opportunity to create and exhibit the installation on an international scale will be invaluable, particularly since climate change is a global event,” Frerichs noted.

Frerichs is collaborating with Courtney Wigdahl-Perry, assistant professor of Biology at Fredonia, and other scientists on pollution, invasive species and algae blooms.

“I view this project as a long-term plan to engage venues along other Great Lakes venues, particularly including Superior and Lake Michigan and potentially Ontario. The goal through the exhibitions is to connect audiences, artists and scientists, and generate further awareness and conception of the current lake system status across the Great Lakes region.”

A summer/fall 2020 completion date has been set for Frerichs’ project, with exhibitions to begin that fall. Total value of Frerichs’ grant is $8,800.

Global Warming Art Project grants were also awarded to Dorothea Braemer, assistant professor of media production at SUNY Buffalo State, for “Solar Global Arming Oracle,” and the Buffalo Center for Arts & Technology, which operates youth arts programs, for the student-led documentary “Global Groove: Environmental Edition.”

The grant program is administered by the Arts Services Initiative of Western New York, Inc.