The gallery doors of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis act as a portal to another world where an echoing, ambient sound can be heard in the distance.  

This world is dimly lit and guarded by two large human-like figures, their long hair made of gray and black fibers, dressed in what might be space suits of the future or the casualwear of an alien species, fused together with colorful yarn. 

“These spaces, you might feel like it’s a real space, but it’s actually a dream space,” artist and UC Davis Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp said. “Not where you’re told facts but where you’re invited to engage with images, engage sounds and see what comes up for you.” 

The new exhibit, Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, showcases art that combines ideas of both climate change and social justice through connection, contamination, catastrophe and hope. Three UC Davis scholars toured the gallery and talked about how these works connect to their own work and the broader world. 

Learning how to breathe 

Individuals dance across a beach, at times disembodied, each contained in their own vertical video — hands clasped behind their back, feet sinking into wet sand, a full body in the distance reaching either toward the ground or sky.   

Standing among the 18-channel video installation by Jin-me Yoon called Turning Time (Pacific Flyways), 2022, Kemp, chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance, mimicked the sound of those feet squishing into the sand on the screen.  

“It’s really haptic — this one you can actually hear. You can hear the breeze, you can hear the feet,” she said. “The body is moving and, again, you can hear it: quish, qeesh.” 

The many images of feet reminded Kemp of her own work.  

“This one I love because I work with feet all the time — quite honestly, in my own work, hundreds of images of feet,” Kemp said.  

The work she is referencing depicts seemingly disembodied feet dangling — her feet, black feet, dancing or are they hanging? 

Most of the time, she said, because the feet are black, both feet are off the ground and near some trees, people will assume the worst. 

“They’re making up all kinds of stories when, in fact, it is joy,” she said. “Now a lot of people are experiencing brown and black as just a place of pain and not remembering that these are dancing feet also.” 

Kemp’s work questions how systems of scientific and social engineering manipulate voice, breath, flesh, communities and the natural world. She incorporated the Breath(e) exhibit into her course “Page, Pen, Image — Performance, Black World Literature” (AAS 152) offered this fall. 

Her goal is to engage students both from a research perspective and a creative one. It begins with breathwork. 

Breath(e) curators Glenn Kaino and Mika Yoshitake conceived of the exhibit in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and during America’s racial reckoning when the safety of breathing was in question. 

By using canonical Black literature and visual art, Kemp’s students will learn and reflect on the relationship between climate change and social justice, primarily through the lens of the Black experience. A musical soundscape incorporating their responses will be added to the exhibit via a QR code. Students will also create original dances inspired by critical reading and viewing of the artwork in Breath(e), which will culminate in a performance at the museum on Nov. 18. 

“Most of the students are not actors and breathwork helps them to access bodies and emotional life,” Kemp said. “In this class, most students have commented that the breathwork helps them to feel grounded. The work offers a respite from the challenges of being a student in these challenging socio-political times.” 

Water in Flint, Michigan and the California Central Valley   

In the series of photographs on the wall, families pose in front of a mobile water tank or filling plastic bottles. Children play in a spray of water. A man holds up a sign that reads, “Free Water.” 

The series from LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint Is Family Act III depicts a day in 2019 when an atmospheric water generator was brought to Flint, Michigan to provide residents with clean, safe drinking water.  

Between 2014 and 2015, over 140,000 Flint residents had been exposed to lead and other contaminants in their drinking water after the city changed its water source without taking steps needed to avoid lead contamination.  

Frazier’s photographs reminded Jacob Hibel, an associate professor of sociology, of the summer he taught math at a Baltimore elementary school before pursuing his Ph.D. The building didn’t have air conditioning, so he brought fans to class. The kids would take turns standing in front of the slightly cooler air pushed out by those spinning blades.  

Like in Flint, the water in the elementary school wasn’t safe to drink because the school had old plumbing. Its water fountains were wrapped in caution tape. At some point, Hibel started bringing jugs of water to class.  

“This was a very underfunded urban school system that couldn't keep the lights on or provide safe water to the kids,” said Hibel, “and then they were expected to pay attention to a math lesson after coming in from recess sweaty and not able to drink water.” 

Rural communities in California’s Central Valley are not so different, he said. In Flint, Baltimore and communities across California, problems with clean water disproportionately affect low-income residents. 

“Some communities don’t have access to water, especially communities that are made-up of migrant farm workers where the population swells and declines with the crops,” Hibel said. “Schools have a hard time supporting those students, and then often they’re living in situations where they don't have water.” 

California rural communities also face an increasing problem with extreme heat.  

Despite the extremely cool summer of 2025, the number of days above 100 degrees in California has gone up. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), during the 126-year period ending in 2020, the six warmest years have all occurred since 2014. The 2015-2020 period saw the highest number of extremely hot days. 

Hibel recently launched a study on heat readiness in California public schools that involves researchers across University of California campuses, including climate scientists, pediatricians, education researchers and sociologists like himself. 

Public schools in the state’s hottest regions often have the fewest resources while serving large populations of children from low-income families. These schools are also least likely to have infrastructure like air conditioning or shade trees to protect kids from the heat. 

The study’s results will contribute to heat readiness plans that will be developed in partnership with schools in the Sacramento Valley and act as models for other schools across California.  

Though increasing temperatures and extreme heat is part of climate change, Hibel's work focuses on the idea of environmental heat itself. Heat isn’t perceived as political in the same way as the concept of climate change.  

“It doesn't really matter why there are extremely hot days,” Hibel said. “You don't have to tie it to climate change.” 

Hope as a muscle in the fight for climate justice 

The cast was a replica of a dead peach tree. As if ripped from the ground, it was upside down, its roots reaching to the sky. Its barren branches lay across the museum floor. A victim of extreme heat in her Los Angeles garden, the peach tree was memorialized by artist Clarissa Tossin in her work Rising Temperature Casualty after she witnessed the tree die in her yard.  

Elisabeth Sellinger, a Ph.D. candidate working with the Ocean Climate Lab Group at UC Davis, said that the artwork’s inverted roots reminded her of her research on seagrass meadows, which are critical ecosystems that act as nursery habitats for many marine creatures. Capable of cloning itself, seagrass meadows form vast networks of roots beneath the sediment like one giant organism. 

“Imagine doing this with seagrasses,” she said, “flipping them over so your gaze is on the part you don’t normally see, all the roots and the rhizomes.” 

Seagrass meadows are buffers against climate change, being natural carbon sinks that reduce the detrimental effects of ocean acidification — something Sellinger is quantifying in her research. She has also found that what happens in one meadow affects the others nearby. 

“If you were to X-ray through the ground to all their roots, you would see how they all attach,” Sellinger said. “It’s cool to visualize, but it makes me nervous because they’re very susceptible to catastrophe as clones.”    

As Sellinger toured the museum’s exhibit, she stopped and reflected on the pieces related to marine life. Growth: Crystal Reef (OG:CR) shows a 3D-printed replica of a coral reef suspended over a static-laden screen playing a video of a school of fish. 

Nearby, a series of paintings titled Ghosts of the Gulf by artist and biologist Brandon Ballengée displays yellowish black renditions of a moray eel, a catshark and a spreadfin skate. The medium included crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  

“I wonder if these species were all known to have been affected by the spill or if they’re just ones the artist chose,” Sellinger pondered.  

The answer: the fish featured in Ghosts of the Gulf are species that have disappeared since the spill. 

An artist in addition to being a scientist, Sellinger recalled a recent fire at the Vistra Moss Landing Power Plant and Energy Storage Facility near Elkhorn Slough, an estuary near Monterey Bay. The slough, which is part of a nature preserve, is a field site for Sellinger’s research on seagrass meadows. Following the fire, researchers found elevated levels of heavy metal in the soil. 

“If I somehow developed the talent to produce something like this,” Sellinger said, “those fires leaving heavy metals could somehow be turned into art, I think.”   

As she walked around the exhibition, Sellinger spoke about cohabitation, about how that idea sometimes gets lost in the ways people perceive nature. Like the roots connecting vast communities of seagrass meadows, humanity’s existence is tied to the environment. What impacts one, impacts the other.  

“It’s always like ‘this is where we live, this is where nature lives,’” she said. “We go and ‘visit’ nature, but in reality, we are a part of nature.”     

Sellinger hopes to be an agent of positive change. In the face of environmental devastation, she emphasized the importance of hope.      

“That’s why I work with Tessa Hill,” she said, referring to the principal investigator of her lab and a UC Davis earth and planetary sciences professor. “She’s such an inspiration, but she’s also very transparent with how she’s feeling.”  

Sellinger recalled a presentation Hill gave at the Davis Science Café last year.   

“She talked about how hope is like a muscle that you have to exercise. I think about that all the time, especially when I’m not very hopeful.”  

Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice is organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. It was part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a collaborative arts event across Southern California organized by Getty, and has since traveled to the Moody Center for Arts at Rice University and now the Manetti Shrem Museum where it is on view until Nov. 29. 

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