Tali Weinberg (b.1982) is an American artist based in Champaign, Illinois. Weinberg graduated from New York University in 2004, 2011 and California College of the Arts in 2013. Using sculpture, drawing, and textiles, Weinberg translates climate data into abstracted landscapes and waterscapes. Weinberg’s abstracted works are held in public and private collections and have been exhibited internationally. Recent exhibitions include the University of Colorado Art Museum, 21C Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, 108 Contemporary, and the Center for Craft. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Surface Design Journal, the Tulsa Voice and literary Journal Ecotone.

Through her practice, Weinberg looks to the history of weaving as a subversive language for women and marginalized groups and outlines the artwork as a feminist, material archive of climate knowledge, care, and attention.

In her 2017 series, What Color Was the Water? Weinberg uses woven panels to trace and interpret 137 years of annual average temperature of the world’s oceans with climate data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While each panel is based on the same data, the coding changes, exploring how choices in representation shifts how we see and what we know. These changes in colour from panel to panel point to the differing ways in which we observe and experience changes to the water that connects us all (the golden dryness of the desert, a shimmering mirage, acidification, the redness of rising temperatures, the death of organisms filling the ocean with blood).

Watch Tali’s presentation as part of the Climate Data panel during the FUMA Data Imaginary Symposium 2022.

This work features in: GUAM (2021) | FUMA (2022)