The winning designs of the 2023 Grantham Art Prize, by Janet Alao (left), Samuel Webb (top right) and Ria Hoondle (bottom right).
Grantham Climate Art Prize 2025 - Design the Future: From Grey to Green
Applications for the 2025 Grantham Climate Art Prize are now closed.
The winning design, for a mural to draw attention to the climate crisis, will be transformed into a large-scale mural by a professional artist at our South Kensington Campus in Dalby Court. It will also be shown at the Great Exhibition Road Festival on 7 and 8 June 2025, alongside an exhibition of photographs of designs from our 2023 art prize.
More than 550 students at Imperial and surrounding schools, colleges and universities submitted designs connected to the theme 'From Grey to Green' – inspired by Imperial’s sustainability strategy. The winning mural design is currently being decided by a panel of judges. The mural will be a hopeful vision of a sustainable future shaped by nature-based solutions – and will also celebrate Imperial’s work in green innovation. It might, for example, capture an urban environment and how it might look greener and more sustainable in the near future.
“We hope the mural will raise awareness of the climate crisis by those who pass and inspire them to take action to alleviate its worse effects, allowing us to live more sustainably. We invite young people to take part because it is their futures that will be most affected by climate change and therefore their aspirations should be magnified.”Linsey Wynton, Senior Outreach and Communications Officer
We will also be announcing another competition in 2025 for a mural for our White City campus, in addition to a mural workshop with a professional artist and climate scientist. We will announce this once details are finalised. If you like to keep updated, please sign-up for our weekly newsletter.
What is the Grantham Art Prize?
The art prize is a biennial competition. Previous themes have included British biodiversity loss (2021) and a greener, cleaner, cooler world (2023), inspired by the Grantham Institute’s 9 things you can do about climate change.
Showcasing winners from previous art prizes, we have created 12 murals across Great Britain – from Brighton to Glasgow. We have also had exhibitions of winning and runner-up designs at COP26, in two Natural History Museum Real World Science Network museums, beside Battersea Power Station and on billboards across London’s transport hubs. An exhibition of the 2021 art prize is launching before Christmas at Imperial’s South Kensington campus on Sherfield Walkway.
As to why we run the competition, a previous participant in the Grantham Climate Art Prize workshops Mahamood Mubarak, then a PhD student, summed it up:
“When you talk to young people about climate change – it is a challenge to make it hopeful and not too frightening… but there is a therapeutic element to creating art to express and share their hopes… Through this project I’ve learned the value of art and how it complements science – topics I spent months studying can be captured in a visually striking way that speaks to all.”
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