Art of Warning ◊ Art of Witness

Mary Ciani

After a long and varied life in art, Mary Ciani is using all that she has learned to create an Art of Warning and an Art of Witness.

ART OF WARNING: future terrors, boiling slowly. Ciani’s work radically changed a decade ago when the world changed around her. As Bastrop burned and Harvey swirled over a hot Gulf and slammed into Houston, she urgently changed subject, medium, and palette. Instead of painting what she always did – metaphors of lives lived in time – Ciani drew back focus to a much wider view. As reports appeared of glaciers melting and seas rising in the distant future, she drew the Flood Drawings and then large Deluge Paintings. To collect ideas, she drew small daily drawings on Italian watercolor paper, Postcards from the Future mailed back to us as warnings. Then the cause of future deadly climate crises became clearer: our civilization’s burning of oil and natural gas (methane) created a blanket of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere trapping heat. So Ciani turned from painting blue water to prophetic terrifying imaginings of black oil and red blood, cause and effect.

ART OF WITNESS: What we once feared is now upon us. The climate crisis showed up early! Our aggressive burning of oil continues unchecked, hidden under a barrage of industrial obfuscation. This causes an erratic pendulum of weather that swings from tropical rain and hail storms that water plants doomed to burn as tinder when the weather swings back to drought and hellish summers. Millions suffer under 100° heat. We are learning a new vocabulary: heat dome, atmospheric river, bomb cyclone, polar vortex. Climate disasters strike worldwide now: fires ignite Australia, Canada, Texas, California…. When Los Angeles burned in January, 2025, Ciani’s palette changes briefly to hot yellows and cerise. What can we do? What will we do? Why do we not do it?

Ciani enters an arena of artists making urgent images that cut through the noise of pop culture and lies. From her studio in Texas she looks out to a view of doves and cardinals, a pond and bamboo forest, but sees only deluge, oil, blood, and fire.

Deluge, Black Oil, Snowmelt, Shattering Rock, 4’ x 12’ Polyptych of four 4’ x 3’ canvases, Golden paints, 2020-2024