Without A Trace

From hyperrealistic glacier portraits to provocative land art, two artists confront our increasingly dire situation.

ZARIA FORMAN ARCTIC MESSENGER

Zaria Forman saw her first glacier in 2007. She was 23, a recent grad of Skidmore’s studio art program who’d grown up just north of Manhattan in a home well stocked with paints, crayons, and charcoal sticks. That summer’s trip to western Greenland was one of many her family embarked on to the globe’s least-developed corners, courtesy of her mother, landscape photographer Rena Bass Forman. Seeing the towering glaciers of Ilulissat, some of which rivaled New York skyscrapers in stature, set Forman’s own artistic journey in motion. “It really opened my eyes to the climate crisis,” she says from her Brooklyn studio. “It’s arguably the largest crisis we face as a global society.”