Earth is a Snowball: Recent work by School of Art & Design Faculty

The exhibit Earth is a Snowball: Recent work by School of Art & Design Faculty opens Sept. 10 and will be on display in the Laura and Paul Mesaros Galleries through Nov. 4, 2026. Snowball Earth is a geohistorical hypothesis coined by Joseph Kirschvink in 1992 that posits that our world was completely frozen, or at least in a slushy state, for a period of some hundreds of millions of years. This global freeze is said to have ushered in the Avalon and Cambrian explosions, sudden evolutionary events wherein metazoan biodiversity massively increased. In short, this inhospitable state may have been the bottleneck that triggered multicellularity, the origin of what we know as complex life. This theory is not without its skeptics. Opponents argue that if Earth were in fact to ever freeze over, it would be impossible to thaw. For the same reason, we humans fear stagnation— whether personal, economic, or environmental— as these too might result in an irreversible snowball. But it is precisely this period of incubation that welcomes the next stage. Growth is still underway while we wait for better conditions. After all, the ingredients must be prepared before the primordial soup is made. This is what the studio is. Artists are the soup, or rather, they are the ones making it. It is this cycle of reflection and creation that drives the faculty of the School of Art & Design. It is what inspires their shared research interests of sustainability and a global understanding of our place in the world. There is no thaw without freeze, no success without struggle, no growth without stagnation. Sometimes, Earth is a snowball.