Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet

Have you looked at the globes in Uptown Charlotte yet?

Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet is a free, outdoor, public art exhibit featuring more than 30 globes, each 5 feet in diameter, and each designed by a different artist.

Each globe is a creative expression of a different way that individuals or businesses can reduce climate change.

The exhibit opened Thursday, June 25th, 2020, and will be on display through October. It’s previously been shown in Chicago, Washington D.C., San Francisco, San Diego, Houston, Copenhagen, Vancouver, Geneva, Marseille, Cleveland, Amsterdam and more cities. 

As it arrived in Charlotte, six local artists contributed brand new globes for the exhibit. 

If these globes look familiar to you, you might have seen them in their staging area in Camp North End. If you missed them there, you can see them in their former, temporary home in this Self-Guided Art Walking Tour. 

You can’t miss these globes if you’re in Uptown Charlotte. They’re on Tryon Street, all the way from outside Founder’s Hall, at Trade Street, to McCall Center for Art + Innovation, at 11th Street, although we only walked up to 9th Street, so we didn’t see the globes past that point.

There are also some globes on 6th Street, both on the Discovery Place Science side and the McGlohon Theatre/ Charlotte Mecklenburg Library side.

While you’re checking out the globes make sure to keep walking down Tryon Street to between 3rd and 4th Streets, where you can see the Black Lives Matter mural. You might have seen one of the excellent aerial photographs of the mural, but each letter has so much detail and meaning that you will want to spend some time with each.

For now, traffic is closed to that block, so you can spend some time up with, get up close, and look at it from all angles. 

Artist: Dakotah Aiyanna

Artist: John Hariston Jr.

Learn about the artists who created each letter, and the meaning behind each one on ArtisticFuel.com