Carbon Portraits is an interactive art project that highlights how our personal behavior and consumption patterns contribute to climate change. Carbon Portraits was originally commissioned for the exhibition Weather Report: Art and Climate Change that was curated by Lucy R. Lippard for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and EcoArts Connections in 2007.

Large quantities of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere, which are a direct result of fossil fuel consumption, are the driving factor in worldwide climate change. For this project local participants were asked to calculate their partial CO2 footprint resulting from their household energy use, and airplane and car travel. The participants were then interviewed and asked to reflect upon their personal energy consumption patterns. These six individual carbon “portraits” were then configured with carbon research, as well as with various climate change celebrity “portraits” (Julia Roberts, Edward Norton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Wangari Maathai and others) to form a broader picture of CO2 emission patterns and possible solutions to this dangerous problem. These six Carbon Portraits were exhibited as panels outside the public library in Boulder, Colorado during the exhibition Weather Report: Art and Climate Change.

To calculate our own partial carbon footprint go to: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html