Climate Imaginarium: 2026 Opening Party
🥳 Come celebrate the start of our third season on Governors Island! ✨
Celebrate the opening of our third season on Governors Island and experience this year’s climate-themed art exhibition, Witness to Change: Interpreting Climate Data, and the NYC Climate Writers Collective’s Choose Your Own (mis)Adventure with Climate Data interactive writing prompt installation. Serious times call for radical joy! Come, join the festivities and discover what you will make happen this year in the Climate Imaginarium.
Live music will be performed by Reality Check and Nyota Blume, with poetry by Jayshawn Lee, upcycled crafting by Rosina Mae, and an activation by Scientist Rebellion!
🌍 Join the party at the Climate Imaginarium!
Join us at Building 406A on Colonels Row for a lively celebration of climate art, storytelling, and community!
The Climate Imaginarium is a nonprofit center for climate, community, and culture. Since its launch in 2024, the Climate Imaginarium has welcomed over 10,000 visitors and featured more than 580 cultural practitioners through 200+ climate programs on Governors Island. Now in its third year, the Climate Imaginarium has become a vital hub for New York City’s climate community, activating a cultural destination for the City's burgeoning green economy and offering flagship programs including Climate Cafe NYC, Broadway Climate Summit, and the NYC Climate Writers Collective.
The Climate Imaginarium produces dynamic programming in partnership with a coalition of universities, cultural institutions, media organizations, and arts nonprofits to reimagine and actualize more resilient futures. Through collective visioning and radical imagination, the Climate Imaginarium features exhibitions, performances, film screenings, immersive experiences, and events in alignment with five core themes: climate storytelling, climate emotions, climate justice, climate literacy, and community resilience.
🎨 Experience the opening of our third annual climate-themed exhibition, Witness to Change: Interpreting Climate Data
Join us for the exhibition opening of "Witness to Change," a climate art exhibition in defiance of the dismantlement, erasure, and obfuscation of climate data, which features works from over 50 artists.
This climate art exhibition posits the artist as a sensor to various types of climatic change — quantitative or qualitative. It can focus on the broadest strokes of rising temperatures down to specific ecological and urban disruptions. While science and truth are under attack, art paired with data communicates a powerful story to shed light on what is at stake and who we must protect, so that none of us are erased as merely a number in our fight for a more just world.
Climate‑monitoring agencies, research stations, and data‑collection networks — once the backbone of public understanding and policy‑making — are being defunded, restructured, and shuttered. Witness to Change: Interpreting Climate Data brings art to Governors Island addressing climate data not merely as a technical resource, but as a democratic right. We aim to confront this erasure of data while acknowledging a necessary humanist approach to its collection and analysis. In exposing the richness of the information, biodiversity, and communities we are losing, we investigate the cultural and ecological consequences of their absence. This exhibition offers both a memorial to what is being lost and a rallying call for new, resilient modes of observation as our artists amplify the muted frequencies of our planet.
📚 Experience the NYC Climate Writers Collective’s Choose Your Own (mis)Adventure with Climate Data
Come learn and play in the NYC Climate Writers Collective’s immersive, choose-your-own-adventure climate science exhibition. Suit up in a lab coat and practice inquiry skills through experiments while playing the role of Meteorologist, Virologist, or Ornithologist. You can then process your data and share your climate solutions story with writing activities at the Poetry Lab!
⛵ Getting to the Climate Imaginarium
The last ferry to Governors Island will depart from Manhattan at 4:15pm. The last returning ferry will depart from Governors Island at 6:00 PM.
For the weekend ferry schedule to Governors Island, please check here. Ferries run every 30 minutes. Take the ferry that’s most convenient for you from either Lower Manhattan (10 South Street), Brooklyn Bridge Park (Pier 6), or Red Hook/Atlantic Basin. Please arrive 15 minutes prior to your ferry departure time with your ticket ready to display.
Ferry tickets must be purchased at the ferry terminal or online. Fares from Lower Manhattan are $5 for a round trip and free for adults over 65, children 12 and under, Climate Imaginarium summer volunteers, and others. All passengers ride free before 11am on weekends. Cars are not permitted.
Governors Island is also accessible by the South Brooklyn NYC Ferry route. Brooklyn ferry tickets must be purchased in advance of boarding and are $4.50 each way. You can find the NYC Ferry Schedule for the South Brooklyn route here.
Once you get to Governors Island, you will either get out at Soissons Landing (from 10 South Street) or Yankee Pier (from Brooklyn). You can use this map of Governors Island to locate Colonels Row. The Climate Imaginarium is in Building 406A, in the middle of Colonels Row, and will have a visible sign outside the doorway. Our address is 406A Comfort Road.
This event is part of Community Week NYC (May 9-17, 2026) - a citywide celebration of social connection. Explore all events so you can find your people at www.communityweek.nyc. #communityweeknyc