“A Tragedy of the Commons” Exhibition Created By Sean Caulfield At Charlotte Gallery
Wed, Mar 18, 2026 | 6pm to 8pm
Dubois Center at UNC Charlotte Center City, Projective Eye Gallery
320 East Ninth Street, Charlotte, NC 28202
This exhibition is on display February 16- April 15.
“A Tragedy of the Commons” is an exhibition made up of large-scale text and image linocut, inkjet, and silkscreen prints created by artist Sean Caulfield in collaboration with Susan Colberg (typography) and Steven Hoffman (text). Accompanying these linocuts are a selection of sculptures with printed elements, made from reused/found wood, which speak to the forms and themes within the prints.
The project was initiated by Hoffman, who created text in response to Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning work on design principles for sustainably managing common-pool resources. Hoffman’s text was written to address a wide range of audiences to stimulate critical thinking about energy transition and public policy in relation to environmental change. Imagery that emerged in response to this text speaks to themes of environmental and corporeal transformation, blurring boundaries between the biological and the technological, the organic and the mechanical.
In developing imagery for this project Caulfield looked to several sources for inspiration, including historic woodcuts from the Northern Renaissance, as well as more contemporary sources such as the illustrations of Dr. Seuss, comics and manga. In this way the exhibition also thematically considerers the history of illustration and European printmaking and the ways these histories have been intertwined with politics, religion, art, activism, propaganda and colonialism.
“A Tragedy of the Commons” investigates how visual art, with an emphasis on utilizing the traditions of printmaking as a dissemination and communication tool, can foster discussion across broad communities about environmental change, as well as ways to sustain an engaged liberal democracy in which respectful political discourse can occur.
Sean Caulfield is a professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta, Canada, living and working in Treaty Six territory. He has exhibited his prints, drawings, installations and artist’s books extensively throughout Canada, the United States, Europe and Japan. Caulfield’s work is in various public and private collections including: Houghton Library, Harvard University, USA; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA. In 2017 Caulfield was elected to the Arts Division of the Academy of the Arts and Humanities of the Royal Society of Canada.