Collection: Climate Change Art

When Dave Curtis picked up a brush in 2017, he was navigating the wreckage of his own life — a difficult divorce that had upended everything familiar. What emerged from that private storm was not autobiography but prophecy: a series of twelve paintings that translate personal dissolution into planetary reckoning. The Aquarium Series is climate change art at its most visceral — creatures wrenched from their ecosystems, seascapes turned inside out, a world holding its breath beneath rising water. Curtis, a Northern Virginia painter with four decades of surrealist, symbolist practice, channeled Jungian archetypes and Lovecraftian creatures into images that feel less like commentary and more like testimony from inside the flood.

That body of work has since been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, the American Revolution Museum in Yorktown, and lives in collections that include a Smithsonian national museum and the historic USS Yorktown. Fellow artist and publisher David Heatwole — Curtis’s longtime collaborator and champion — responded to the series by publishing it as a limited-edition book, “A Dive into Sir Real’s Aquarium,” in a run of only 400 copies, 200 of them signed and numbered by the artist. That rarity is intentional. The Aquarium Series was never meant to be easy to forget.

Wear the Work: Climate Change Art for the Conscious Collector

The This Artist’s Dream merchandise collection brings the Aquarium Series into your daily life without diminishing what it asks of you. These are not decorations — they are environmental art objects designed to carry genuine weight. The apparel, tote bags, and climate change art prints in this collection reproduce Curtis’s images with the fidelity the work demands, translated onto materials you reach for every morning and carry into the world. A tote printed with a Curtis Aquarium image becomes a quiet provocation at a farmer’s market or museum shop; a graphic tee worn in the city carries the full strangeness of his post-apocalyptic seascape into ordinary afternoon light.

This line was conceived with art museum gift shops in mind — spaces where people arrive already open to being moved, already prepared to carry something meaningful home. Curtis’s aquarium series art occupies that precise territory: work that earns its place on a body or a wall not merely as imagery but as a sustained argument about where we find ourselves and what we owe the world we have inherited. The dark irony, the inverted ecosystems, the creatures displaced from everything that once sustained them — this is climate change art that does not soften its subject. It asks the question and lets it linger.

Explore the collection and find the piece that carries the argument forward for you.