About — ARTISTS COMMIT

Artists Commit is an artist-led collective committed to a climate-conscious, resilient, and equitable future.

Artists Commit is a loosely organized collective of individuals with a shared commitment. As a platform, the group has provided tools and resources to support artists catalyzing climate action, in particular through the impact of the work we make and how it travels through the art world.

Contact us at artistscommit@gmail.com.

Background

Artists Commit emerged in 2021 as a group of artists who signed on to Committing to a Climate-Conscious Future for NYC Galleries, a letter written by New York City gallery workers and published by Galleries Commit. Read or sign the original letter here. The collective now includes artist signatures from all over the world and includes both gallery represented and independent artists. The tools and resources here are available to all artists.

Artists Commit is informed by conversations of Culture Declares Emergency New York, which evolved out of Culture Declares Emergency in the UK. These initiatives emerged from a long history of arts and civil rights activism. The frameworks they champion have often been pioneered by BIPOC, femme-identified, and LGBTQ+ communities and date back to Indigenous practices. We are deeply indebted to their guidance and this history.

Artists Commit’s inaugural fiscal sponsor was Art into Acres, an artist-founded, 501(c)(3) environmental initiative, and is now fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas.

Leadership Team

Deville Cohen

Deville Cohen is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. He studied sculpture at the KHB Berlin from 2002-2007 and received his MFA in film/video from Bard College NY in 2010. Deville is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Collaborative Art department at Tisch School of the Arts of New York University.

Jessica Gath

Jessica Gath is a possibilitarian who makes artwork in paint, garments, zines, food, correspondence, community, activism, songs, dirt, and whatever else gets the job done. Cycles of life and our connections to Earth and one another are integral to her practice. Jessica received funding from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Scholler Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s PA Preferred program to create an art almanac for eating seasonally and locally in DC / MD / NJ / NYC / Eastern PA’s foodshed. She is an elected member of her Election Board.

Andrew Kachel

Andrew Kachel is a New York-based art worker, curator, and Director & Felix Gonzalez-Torres Liaison at Andrea Rosen Gallery. As a co-founder of Galleries Commit and a core organizer of Artists Commit, he is part of a coalition of artists and art workers organizing laterally toward more resilient and climate-conscious ways of working. He holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Jenny Kendler

Jenny Kendler is an interdisciplinary artist, naturalist, wild forager and environmental activist based in Chicago and various forests. Her work aims to re-enchant our relationship with the natural world by de-centering the human, making space for the radical, transformative ‘otherness’ of our biodiverse Earth.

Her projects have been shown at London’s Hayward Gallery, Storm King Art Center, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the MCA Chicago and public locations as diverse as urban riverwalks, remote deserts and tropical forests. Her recent solo project on Governors Island was reviewed in a full page article in the New York Times. From 2014–2024 she was artist-in-residence with environmental nonprofit NRDC and is the current Artistic Fellow with the Center for Humans and Nature. She sits on boards for 350.org and artist residency ACRE and is a co-founder of Artists Commit.

Laura Lupton, Emeritus

Laura Lupton is a co-founder of the worker-led sister initiative Galleries Commit and the lead organizer co-founding Artists Commit. She now serves on the leadership board as an emeritus advisor. Outside of Artists Commit, Laura is the founder of LHL Consulting, a firm working on ideas that center culture, climate, and our collective future.

Robin F Williams

Robin F Williams (she/they) is a Brooklyn based painter who acknowledges the Lenape and Canarsie people as the original stewards of the land. They received their BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Their work has been featured in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally and is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Columbus Museum of Art; and X Museum, Beijing, China; among others. They signed the Galleries Commit open letter in 2020, and with other artists and art workers helped found Artists Commit. They are part of an ongoing project to make the tools of the collective more accessible to artists on a broader scale. They also promote and celebrate the group's vital work in the press and oversee their social media.