Justin Brice Guariglia
Responsibility
Statement
Biography
Justin Brice Guariglia was born in Maplewood, New Jersey in 1974. He lives and works in New York City. Guariglia conceives long-term, research-driven projects, produced in collaboration with scientists, philosophers, and poets, that take the shape of pictures, objects, and public interventions, at once seductive and unsettling. Within his practice, which mixes painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, language, augmented reality, and public space, the artist attends to worlds that exceed human perception in scale or in kind — melting ice sheets, the sapient lives of forests, landscapes remade by extraction — tracing the thresholds where these withdrawn worlds become sensible, and where the limits of human knowing give way to a reverence for the natural world.
Guariglia is currently a Climate, Earth, and Society Distinguished Fellow at the Columbia Climate School (2026–). Beginning in 2015 he flew seven missions with NASA scientists over Greenland's ice; he has since served as Senior Fellow and Artist-in-Residence at the Woodwell Climate Research Center (2018–2021), as Distinguished Climate Fellow and Special Envoy to the Ecological Crisis at the Pratt School of Architecture and Urban Design (2021), and as artist-in-residence at the Anchorage Museum (2018–2021). As an inaugural Science Sandbox Fellow at the Simons Foundation (2017), he developed After Ice, an augmented-reality app in collaboration with NASA, to visualize rising sea levels.
His solo exhibitions include Earth Works: Mapping the Anthropocene, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2017–18), and USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2018–19); Topographies of the Anthropocene, Lincoln Center, New York (2016); Baked Alaska: A Community Response, Anchorage Museum (2019); and WE ARE THE ASTEROID (2018– ), shown at more than a dozen sites across the United States. In 2018 he realized Climate Signals, presented by the Climate Museum with the NYC Mayor's Office across all five boroughs of New York City, and in 2019 REDUCE SPEED NOW!, debuting Earth Day, a takeover of the courtyard of Somerset House, London.
His work has also been exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale in Mare Nostrum, an official collateral event (2019); Storm King Art Center, New York; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Colorado; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and the For Freedoms 50 States Initiative; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, the Netherlands; the MassArt Art Museum, Boston; and the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine.
He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant (2017) and a Howard Foundation Fellowship at Brown University (2017), and was shortlisted for the international COAL Art and Environment Prize, France (2019). In 2019 he delivered the Aldo Leopold Distinguished Lecture at the University of Northern Iowa, a series whose past speakers include Elizabeth Kolbert and Terry Tempest Williams.