Tours for 250: From Our Forefathers: Climate Crisis in American Art

Join Aislinn Pentecost-Farren in A Nation of Artists to learn about America’s outsized contribution to climate change through a sequence of encounters with objects that were present at the origins of the crisis, from Indigenous dispossession through the industrial revolution. Pentecost-Farren re-narrates existing exhibitions to reveal the unseen origins of climate change hidden within accepted historical narratives. From a stove made by enslaved ironworkers to an oil painting of a steam turbine, Pentecost-Farren attempts to understand catastrophe by starting at the beginning.

Tours for 250: From Our Forefathers: Climate Crisis in American Art is commissioned by and organized in partnership with ArtPhilly's What Now: 2026 festival.

Questions or accommodation requests? Email [email protected].

Things to know:

• Registration is required.
• Headsets to hear the speaker will be provided.

About the Speaker:

Aislinn Pentecost-Farren is an artist and public historian. She takes museum collections, historic buildings, and overlooked landscapes as the starting point for sculpture, installation, printed media, and public interventions. Her practice infiltrates existing systems of cultural reproduction to reveal new narratives within established histories and explore hindsight, culpability, and time. Aislinn’s work draws on over a decade of experience working with historic sites, museums, and parks as a curator and an artist. She has led dozens of interdisciplinary projects that convene communities and publics around ecology, culture, and history.

Past partners include the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bartram’s Garden, Roebling Museum, Eastern State Penitentiary, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, Hidden City Philadelphia, Glen Foerd on the Delaware, Philadelphia Lazaretto, Fairmount Park Conservancy, the Riverfront North Partnership, the Arts Council of Wales, and Elsewhere Museum. She has exhibited work at Stamps Gallery at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design, The University of Delaware, Western Carolina University, The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Vox Populi, Practice Gallery, and Grizzly Grizzly. She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, USA.