From Our Forefathers: Climate Crisis through Museum Tours

From Our Forefathers is a series of tours that intervene in iconic Philadelphia museums to tell the history of the climate crisis. Pentecost-Farren guides participants through America’s outsized contribution to climate change through a sequence of encounters with objects that were present at the origins of the crisis, from Indigenous dispossession through the industrial revolution. Pentecost-Farren re-narrates existing exhibitions in some of our Philadelphia Museums to reveal the unseen origins of climate change hidden within accepted historical narratives. From a stove made by enslaved ironworkers to an oil painting of a steam turbine, Pentecost-Farren attempts to understand catastrophe by starting at the beginning.