Earth 

From Seed to Scene

Mia Hanak exhibits environmental concern using beauty, not fear

Written by Christopher Caen

Sitting outside the headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya is a transparent box. Inside the box is an African Greenheart (Warburgia ugandensis), an evergreen tree indigenous to Africa. The tree is trapped inside, connected to a life-support system that keeps the tree alive and yet simultaneously separates it from its environment. It is an intriguing piece of environmental art created by French installation artist JC Didier. Yet what is more intriguing is that the genesis of this piece was not Africa or France, but San Francisco's own Natural World Museum. And that may be the most interesting story of all.

The Natural World Museum (NWM) has become a force in the international environmental art world within less than two years, and it now stands ready to take center stage when the museum curates the United Nations environmental art exhibit in Beijing at the 2008 Summer Olympics. The museum has been an amazing success in a very short period of time, and its story provides many lessons for people just starting their own non-profit or looking to take their charitable organization to the next level (see sidebar "Lessons from the Natural World Museum").

The executive director of the NWM is Mia Hanak, a thirty-one-year-old who has the enthusiasm and passion one would expect in a non-profit leader. And yet her background is the not the direct path from beginning to end one would assume. In fact, one could argue that her circuitous route has given her the breadth of tools and knowledge necessary to craft her success.

Hanak's recent change of gears started in 2001 in Boston, where she graduated with a master's degree in Museum Management and Exhibit Design from Tufts University. So armed, she was able to quickly land a curatorial job at the Revolving Museum in Boston. And yet, the easier the exhibits and displays came together, the harder it became for her to reconcile where her life had led her.

To truly understand Hanak's next actions, one has to understand how she arrived at curating the progressive and abstract displays she was putting together at the time. Given that she grew up in an artistic household, it's not surprising that she brought an artistic flair to her work. Her father was a realtor with an affinity for architecture and her mother was a painter and sculptor. The proclivities were there before she even had a chance to take her first step.

Hanak had started to travel the world at an early age, and like many young children do, she immediately fell in love with the variety and wonder of the natural world. (At last count, Hanak has visited over forty countries and more museums that one could hope to see in a lifetime.) But as she grew older, she also determinedly took herself off the beaten path wherever possible. When she was twenty-two, she traveled to Kenya, where she was swept into the local tribal initiation rites that include drinking raw goat's milk and blood. (She was able to get out of it and yet not insult her hosts.) By being part of this ceremony that connects the tribe members with the world around them, Hanak was becoming a naturalist, and she didn't even know it.

On the same trip, she visited Madagascar and Tanzania, but it was the island of Madagascar that triggered the pivotal moment in her life. For the first time, Hanak saw the terrible downside to the intersection of ancient lands and modern industry. Although most of us think of Madagascar as a land of lush rain forests and bounding lemurs, Hanak discovered that the reality was something slightly different: Those beautiful pictures and films we see are shot only along the coast of the island. The entire middle of the island had been stripped and ravaged by the unrelenting assault of industrial nations in the pursuit of natural resources. The entire center of the nation had been reduced to a barren desert.

Suddenly, working at a museum lost its draw. She was in search of something more progressive, an organization that was trying harder to influence change in the world around it and could become a passionate agent for change. She was looking for an organization that did not exist.
 

In search of the answer to her riddle, Hanak headed to grad school at Tufts. She stayed for two years and received her master's degree, but the answer to the riddle was not becoming any clearer. After leaving the Revolving Museum, she headed off to India, where she explored several ancient sites to find inspiration from the past. That's where she started to realize that the answer was to merge her passion for the environment with her passion for the arts. On her return, she took a hard right turn away from museum life and into the world of galleries. At twenty-eight years old, she was running a fine-art gallery that specialized in pieces by Robert Bateman, the noted environmental artist. It was there that she met the other important person in the life of the Natural World Museum, Richard V. Smith. Smith had the largest collection of Robert Bateman originals, and he wanted the public to see it.

Hanak and Smith knew they had the seed of a revolutionary idea, but they were having a hard time putting their fingers on its pulse. What did this organization look like? Was it a gallery, or an exhibit, or a museum? Or a combination of all of these? The one thing they knew was that they were struggling to create something different.

In 2001, they incorporated the museum as a non-profit organization, and they were officially in business. They started off with site-specific exhibits, trying a different approach to environmental awareness. While every other environmental group screamed from the rooftops about the impending doom of greenhouse gases, global warming, and the ozone layer, Hanak and Smith made a startling realization: People were no longer reacting to the warnings. In fact, the public had become desensitized to the doom-and-gloom crowd. The beauty of their solution was that it was a unique take on environmental commentary.

So they crafted something different: an environmental group that would attract using beauty instead of fear, using hope instead of disaster. They took the universal emotional door of art and used it to open the world of environmental responsibility to people. All they had to do now was make it work.

 In October 2004, the Natural World Museum planned its first exhibit, centered on the theme of five elements: space, earth, water, fire, and air. The first problem on their agenda was how to represent these disparate parts. A quick call to the California Academy of Sciences led to an introduction to Judy Prokupek, the senior advisor to the executive director at the time. Prokupek was attracted to the idea of the diversity of perceptions - how people could look at a group of items and come away with different visceral feelings about them. "It was an interesting experience to work with [Hanak] because while many of her team had this scientific background, there was this other consideration of art that was equally as compelling. Beyond that, the Academy had been hosting this city arts and lectures series, and it was billed as the intersection of the arts and sciences . . . so this was an extension of what was already happening. We loved all the contextual things: size, texture, perspective. It's one of those things that appeals to all of your senses."

Prokupek decided to participate in the outlandish attempt, contributing an amethyst to represent fire and petrified wood to represent earth. A huge clamshell stood in to represent water. However, the representative for air presented a completely different set of problems. The Academy offered a jade boulder, which was above and beyond the call of duty. What was even more beyond was that the boulder in question weighed in at a whopping eight hundred pounds. Hanak's experience designing exhibits in Boston never prepared her for the logistics of moving and supporting a rock of this size. Hanak and Smith tracked down and drafted the famed bio-acoustic engineer Bernie Kraus to do the first of his acoustical installations, and then they commissioned local photographers to add content. In other words, the GenerocityMagazines from Costa Rica really did come from a Costa Rican photographer, for example. Soon the United States' National Park Service and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation signed on to help. What attracted the Moore Foundation was the unique combination of the environment and art, a synthesis that they had never seen before. Moore Foundation advisor and former San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan even hosted a fundraiser at the General's House in the Presidio. When the NWM's Anima Mundi ("Soul of the World") exhibit broke in October 2004, it was an instant success, attracting visitors such as environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill and garnering endorsements from Senator Barbara Boxer and Representative Nancy Pelosi.

But the best was still to come. Hard on the heels of their initial success, Hanak heard through the environmental grapevine that San Francisco was going to be hosting the United Nations' World Environment Day (WED) in 2005. Calling in favors left and right, Hanak got herself into the first planning meeting. When she pitched the executive director of World Environment Day San Francisco, Parin Shah, his response was "This is perfect, we have to have it!" Giddily, Hanak bounded out of the meeting before the full implication of what had just happened hit her. Exactly where was she planning to put on the show? Where was the money going to come from? Here was one of those crucial moments that makes or breaks a non-profit, that brings it from seed to scene or keeps it buried in the ground.

Hanak decided to put on a full, museum grade exhibit. And immediately, everyone told her there was no way the NWM could pull it off given the funding requirements and the incredibly tight timeline of four months. Unfortunately for the critics, if there is one thing Hanak does not like, it is being told that something cannot be done. She also realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The World Environment Day celebration was in its thirtieth year, and this was the first time it had come to the United States, let alone to San Francisco. One hundred mayors from around the world were going to be in attendance. In reality, it was too big an opportunity to skimp on the effort.

Another audacious decision was to build the hub of the exhibit during the five days of the WED conference, and have the opening ceremony at the exhibit. Hanak imagined a place where the environment, politics, arts, and culture could come together. It was akin to someone deciding that the opening ceremonies of the Olympics should be at an as-of yet-unbuilt local restaurant. Hanak and the Natural World Museum had only a few months to pull it off, and she and her team were clocking 100 hours a week to achieve their goal. One thought kept bouncing through Hanak's head late at night: "If people think leaving the private sector means working fewer hours, they'd better think again!" WED and UNEP provided the initial support for the effort, and then the energy company Calpine showed up on the scene with more backup. National Geographic even showed up with their own installation to contribute.

But the biggest issue was still money. Because of the aggressive timeline, large corporate sponsorship was never going to arrive in time. They had no choice but to go after individual sponsors. Generation Earth was the first group to pitch in, which then quickly led to the participation of the Tides Foundation and the Marin Community Foundation. Four days before they had to start setting up the installation, they were still rounding up money. They got a television news team out to the exhibit at four o' clock in the morning on the day of the launch to get the word out and drum up interest.

On schedule, the Natural World Museum's World Environment Day exhibit opened with25,000 square feet of environmental art. It represented the largest environmental art exhibit to date. It had been a furious attempt that had almost met with failure many times and threatened to drag down the Natural World Museum with it. So, the question was: Was it worth it? Indeed, because not only did those five days put the museum on the map, it shone a light on San Francisco. Those one hundred mayors came to San Francisco and walked away wanting to be as involved in the environment as San Franciscans were. And moving forward, San Francisco will be one of the first cities to provide an update on the Urban Environmental Accords that were generated at the conference. After all, the difficult part is not getting people involved, but keeping them involved.

In March of this year, the Natural World Museum received their reward for pulling out all the stops that day in 2005. They joined forces with UNEP to launch the Art for the Environment initiative, a series of international exhibitions that will highlight regional environmental issues through the universal language of art, educating and motivating the public to take personal action in local and global conservation efforts. The keynote speaker for the launch was none other than Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Wangari Maathai, whose environmental movement included planting more than 10 million trees in Kenya to prevent soil erosion and provide firewood for cooking fires.

Hanak and her crew had certainly reached rarefied air. She went to Nairobi, where UNEP has its headquarters, and oversaw the installation of JC Didier's work. It was the culmination of one year that defined the Natural World Museum and signaled that San Francisco was once again leading an international charge to improve our planet and our lives. Hanak and the museum is already setting their sights on Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. And it took just one year of chances, sleepless nights, and last-second heroics to make it happen. It was the year that took the Natural World Museum from seed to scene.