The founding members of the Gallery Climate Coalition. Courtesy GCC.
In 2019, when the artist Gary Hume was having a show in New York, he asked his gallery, Matthew Marks, to ship his work from London by sea rather than fly it by air. He also asked the environmentalist Danny Chivers to write a report on the journey. Hume wanted to know what impact shipping his work would have on the journey’s carbon emissions.
It took 13 days for his work to arrive by boat to New York from London, 12 and a half days longer than the usual plane ride. Chivers’s report, published in partnership with logistics company Cadogan Tate, revealed that the carbon footprint created by moving the artworks by sea was 96 percent lower than if they’d been flown by plane, creating 24 metric tonnes of greenhouse gas savings.