Our Time on Earth
Opening Weekend Celebration | February 17 & 18
School Vacation Week: Caring for Creatures and Climate | February 19, 22 & 23
SALEM, MA – The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) invites you on a transformative journey to reimagine your connection with the living planet. Our Time on Earth, a large-scale exhibition organized by the Barbican Centre in London with guest curators FranklinTill and presented as part of PEM’s Climate + Environment Initiative, illuminates a path towards a more sustainable future through innovative artworks and immersive experiences. Making its United States debut at PEM, Our Time on Earth opens February 17 with a whole weekend dedicated to celebrating the power of global creativity. Then, a series of programs on February 19, 22 and 23 invite participants of all ages to explore practical ways to tackle climate change. Meet live animals, discover art making activities and learn about biodiversity on the North Shore.
Visitors to Our Time on Earth will be captivated by collaborative installations crafted by visionary artists, designers, scientists and changemakers hailing from 12 countries. Approach a dinner table set for a fox, a wasp and other unconventional guests; envision the microscopic foundations of life by diving into a virtual ocean surrounded by magnified plankton; and peer through the layers of a giant Kapok tree to visualize how trees act as a living bridge between soil and sky.
Just as PEM is working to mitigate its own environmental impacts through its Climate + Environment initiative, we invite visitors to participate in creating a shared, sustainable future in the PEM-generated “Be the Change” zone of the exhibition, created in collaboration with Rare’s Climate Culture Boston program. There, visitors can add ideas to the collective response wall, choose an action step at the “Count Us In” station and have an empowering climate conversation guided by question cards. This zone will also host regularly scheduled activations, pop-up conversations led by local climate and environment advocates such as Mass Audubon’s Youth Climate Leadership Program and Salem Sound Coastwatch.
OPENING WEEKEND
Saturday, February 17, and Sunday, February 18 | 10 am–5 pm
Our Time on Earth celebrates our collective power to transform the conversation around the climate emergency. Celebrate the opening with curator talks, community art making and pop-up installations. For a full list of events, click HERE.
Rare's "Changing the Climate Culture” pop-up exhibition.
February School Vacation Week at PEM: Caring for Creatures and Climate
Monday, February 19, Thursday, February 22 & Friday, February 23 | 10 am–5 pm
Join us for a weeklong constellation of programs that invite participants of all ages on an inspiring journey of environmental stewardship. Click HERE for a full schedule of events.
PUBLICITY IMAGES
High-resolution images are available upon request.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Share your impressions with us on social media using #OurTimeonEarth #PEMClimate
PUBLICATION
The exhibition is accompanied by an award-winning publication printed with nontoxic inks and on recycled paper. This illustrated book, designed by Stinsensqueeze, showcases artists and works within the exhibition and invites a deeper dive into some of the key themes. Bringing a broad range of voices together, the Our Time on Earth catalog features conversations between artists and activists; a speculative piece of fiction by artist Sin Wai Kin; a graphic mural by Jacob V Joyce; and poetry by climate activists Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviana. It includes essays by leading thinkers, including author and columnist George Monbiot, novelist Daisy Hildyard, Black British feminist educator Janine Francois, writer Jonathan Ledgard and Indigenous educators Sonia Guajajara and Célia Xakriabá. The Our Time on Earth catalog is available at the PEM Shop.
SPONSORS
Our Time on Earth is produced and curated by the Barbican with guest curators FranklinTill and co-produced by Musée de la civilisation, Québec City, Canada. This exhibition is made possible by Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation. We thank James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes, Chip and Susan Robie, and Timothy T. Hilton as supporters of the Exhibition Innovation Fund. We also recognize the generosity of the East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum.
IMAGE CREDITS
- Victoria Vesna, Noise Aquarium (detail), 2022. Installation view of the Our Time on Earth exhibition at the Barbican Centre. © Danann Breathnach Photography.
- Living Root Bridge of The Khasi, Mawlynnong village, India. © Amos Chapple (originally published in Julia Watson, Lo-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism, 2019).
ABOUT RARE
Rare is an international conservation organization helping people and nature thrive. Through research, education and community outreach, Rare shares actionable changes you and your neighbors can make to help the climate, your health, your budget and your community.
ABOUT THE PEABODY ESSEX MUSEUM
Founded in 1799, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts is the country’s oldest continuously operating museum. PEM provides thought-provoking experiences of the arts, humanities and sciences to celebrate the creative achievements and potential of people across time, place and culture. By connecting people through inquiry, empathy and dialogue, PEM encourages an understanding of our shared humanity and fosters a sense of belonging in a complex, ever-changing world. We build, steward and share our superlative collection, which includes African, American, Asian export, Chinese, contemporary, Japanese, Korean, maritime, Native American, Oceanic and South Asian art, as well as architecture, fashion and textiles, photography and one of the nation’s most important museum-based collections of rare books and manuscripts. PEM's campus offers a varied and unique visitor experience, with hands-on creativity zones, interactive opportunities, performance spaces and the Art and Nature Center, as well as numerous gardens and more than a dozen noted historic structures, including Yin Yu Tang, a 200-year-old Chinese home that is the only example of Chinese domestic architecture in the United States.
MEDIA CONTACTS
Whitney Van Dyke | Director of Marketing & Communications | whitney_vandyke@pem.org | 617-259-6722
Amelia Kantrovitz | Exhibition Publicist | amelia_kantrovitz@pem.org | 617-794-4964