Philadelphia Museums Recast as Climate Archives in Aislinn Pentecost-Farren’s Tours
A landscape by Thomas Doughty now serves as an entry point to a much larger argument about American history. During a recent tour at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), artist and curator Aislinn Pentecost-Farren stopped before Doughty’s view of the Fairmount Water Works on the Schuylkill River and traced a line from early 19th-century infrastructure to the climate crisis. The painting, made in the year of the 50th anniversary of US independence, once signaled prosperity through growth, industry and expansion. Pentecost-Farren reads it differently: as evidence of the energy systems, extraction and inequality that helped shape the country.
Her free tour for ArtPhilly 2026, the citywide festival running until July 2 and organized around the US’s 250th anniversary, turns Philadelphia’s museums into sites of historical reckoning. The project began in 2023 as an unsanctioned self-guided brochure styled after the PMA’s own map. Pentecost-Farren left hundreds of copies around the museum, including among the institution’s official guide materials, inviting visitors to encounter the collection through the lens of climate history.
“I had been thinking about the historic places and objects we choose to preserve in the United States and how the climate crisis changes their meaning,” Pentecost-Farren said. At first, she focused on industrial heritage such as coal mining museums and industrialists’ mansions. But the project widened quickly. “Most US history since colonisation is connected to the crisis,” she said.
That idea also shaped her response to the museum world’s fraught relationship with climate activism. As protests against cultural institutions intensified internationally, Pentecost-Farren saw a familiar defensive posture: the claim that collections and climate had little to do with one another. Her tours argue the opposite. The wealth that built museums, she suggests, is part of the same story as extraction, pollution and the widening of economic divides.
In 2024, the PMA invited her to present a live version of the tour for Earth Day. For ArtPhilly, she expanded the project to the Independence Seaport Museum and the Science History Institute, giving each venue a distinct historical frame. At the PMA, the tour addresses race, class, Indigenous dispossession and genocide, alongside colonialism, as part of the climate story embedded in the objects on view. At the Science History Institute, Pentecost-Farren examines how petrochemical companies helped create demand for fossil fuel energy and products such as plastic. At the Independence Seaport Museum, she focuses on energy transitions themselves — and what the present moment might learn from the last one.
“What can we learn from the last energy transition?” she asks. “How can history museums demystify energy transitions, and help us see them more clearly now?” For Pentecost-Farren, the answer lies in context. By placing greenhouse gas growth alongside major episodes in US history, the tours make climate change feel less abstract and more legible — a historical process, not an inevitability.
That framing may be the project’s quietest achievement. Rather than treating the climate crisis as a separate emergency, Pentecost-Farren shows how deeply it is woven into the nation’s museums, monuments and material culture — and how those institutions might help visitors see the past, and the future, with greater clarity.
