Envision Resilience

This exhibition, Envision Resilience: Shifting Tides and Evolving Landscapes, brings together seven Maine-based artists and creative design research from graduate and undergraduate students in the 2024 Envision Resilience Portland and South Portland Challenge. Though working in different disciplines—visual art, research and architecture—both the artists and designers engage in the same fundamental process: interpreting shifting landscapes and rising waters; ideating on new ways to live alongside them.

Ben Spalding, Haley Nannig, Ian Ellis, Jordan Carey, Lokotah Sanborn, Michel Droge and POSEY (aka Pamela Moulton) explore resilience through sculpture, painting, installation and mixed media. Some reflect on the emotional and cultural connections to a changing coastline, while others imagine speculative futures or experiment with materials that embody adaptation. Their work challenges us to see climate change not just as a crisis but as an opportunity for new ways of thinking, feeling and creating.

In conversation with these works, design students from the 2024 Envision Resilience Portland and South Portland Challenge highlight the role of artistic practice in research and design. Throughout their semester, the students turned to art—through drawing, animating and carving—as a way to deepen their understanding of place and get to know the subtleties of Portland and South Portland’s landscapes.  

This exhibition runs in tandem with the Envision Resilience: Designs for Living in a Changing Climate exhibition series at the South Portland Public Library showcasing completed designs from the Envision Resilience Challenge. Image by Michel Droge.

The Envision Resilience Challenge is a multi-university design studio and community engagement initiative that connects interdisciplinary student teams with coastal communities to envision adaptive and creative pathways forward in the face of climate change. This year, its fourth year, it is taking place in Portland and South Portland. The participating schools are UMaine Augusta, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, University at Buffalo, University of Michigan, University of Virginia and University of Toronto. The student designs have reimagined coastal edges and urban systems through nature-based solutions in vulnerable areas, regenerative systems in a post-carbon economy and new ways of living that embrace healthy, sustainable and equitable systems.