Round Weather is a local nonprofit art gallery focused on alleviating the climate crisis that opens this April at 951 Aileen St, Oakland. It directs funds from the sale of art by primarily SF BayArea artists to each year’s three most effective nongovernmental organizations working to curtail global warming. Round Weather's Advisory Council includes the climate movement's longest-standing spokesperson Bill McKibben, environmentalist poets Sandra Alcosser and Brenda Hillman, carbon strategy expert Rahul Young, and NASA climate scientist Nancy Kiang. I am in the process of securing true nonprofit status with an application being expedited for likely sponsorship under the umbrella of 501c3 Earth Island Institute. The gallery will only take 10% of sales for its overhead as it wants to not only redirect impactful capital toward preserving a livable habitat for all but it also is committed to protecting the endangered species of Oakland and other BayArea visual artists.

Several of my local artists friends have talked about how there's a distressing lack of connection between art worlds and environmentalist action, even in the Bay. So when I came up with the idea of this gallery, a local photographer, for example, who I had never met before replied to my email requesting work by writing, "I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU!"

While three of the six artists in the first exhibit are in the SFMOMA collection, the gallery will show work from a wide range of price points and aesthetic heritages so that local art makers and lovers of different incomes, interests, and backgrounds can utilize the gallery as an environmentalist resource. Round Weather will also host an earth writing and ecopoetry reading series (including the most recent Pulitzer winner Forrest Gander) as well as lectures, discussions, and classes/workshops that help Oakland residents answer the question on all our lips, "What can I actually do about the climate crisis?"