Turn Again to the Earth

Centered on the environment, this museum-wide undertaking encourages conversation and action around climate change and the role of the museum. Turn Again to the Earth’s suite of exhibitions continues through January 2026. A sustainability plan for the BMA’s continued path to environmentally friendly practices will be published this spring, and a citywide eco-challenge led by the Museum is ongoing.

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Watershed: Transforming the Landscape in Early Modern Dutch Art
February 9, 2025 — July 27, 2025

A selection of approximately 40 paintings, prints, and drawings from the BMA’s collection explores the role of water and landscape in defining the early modern Dutch Republic.

The water’s edge was a site of rich and often fraught ideas, where environmental, economic, political, and social narratives came to the fore. It also served as a site of immense inspiration for Dutch artists such as Frans Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Salomon Van Ruysdael, among many others. Landscapes depicting harbors, trade, travel, and leisure abounded, as did the production of maps, still lifes, and portraits. Together, these images offer insight into the identity of the young Dutch Republic.

Air Quality: The Influence of Smog on European Modernism
February 9, 2025 — February 22, 2026

This focus exhibition of nine works explores the relationship between burning fossil fuels—namely, coal—and the emergence of European modernism. Drawing on research conducted by climate scientists and art historians, the exhibition presents a range of paintings and works on paper by Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, James McNeill Whistler, and others to explore the ways that their artistic practices and style emerged, in part, in response to widespread pollution in London and Paris.

Malcolm Peacock: a signal, a sprout
March 19, 2025 — October 26, 2025

This exhibition features a monumental installation by New York-based artist and long-distance runner Malcolm Peacock, who spent his formative years in Baltimore.

Inspired by the giant, ancient redwood trees Peacock encountered while training for marathons in the Pacific Northwest, the 8-foot tall and wide tree-like form is covered with thousands of strands of hand-braided synthetic hair—the creation of which was an act of endurance in itself.

Pinned to the sculpture are pages from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) that have inspired the artist. An atmospheric audio recording evokes the interconnectedness of all forms of life with sounds of the artist breathing while running, as well as conversations with his family, friends, and teammates.

Earth as Medium: Extracting Art from Nature
April 6, 2025 — August 17, 2025

Art is, at its core, grounded in the extraction of nature. Artworks are made of and made through the transformation of earth, air, light, animals, and plants. This focus exhibition foregrounds the natural-ness of all artworks and tells a history of artmaking’s relationship to the natural world from historic sustainability to exploitative practice and sustainable futures.

The exhibition features approximately 20 objects from cultures around the world spanning the 14th through 21st centuries. This includes works produced through a communal relationship with nature as well as artworks created by the extraction of materials for industry, leisure, and even explicit domination over nature.

Black Earth Rising
May 18, 2025 — September 21, 2025

Black Earth Rising explores the splendor of nature through paintings, sculptures, films, and works on paper by some of today’s most celebrated artists of African diasporic, Latin American, and Native identity. 

Each of these works demonstrates a form of resisting social and environmental injustices and reclaiming connections to the natural environment against the legacy of European settlement of the New World. Organized by guest curator and renowned author Ekow Eshun, this exhibition both sheds light on the historical trajectory of today’s climate crisis and celebrates the beauty of the natural world and our ties to it. Among the artists featured are Firelei Báez, Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Teresita Fernández, Sky Hopinka, Tyler Mitchell, Wangechi Mutu, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Yinka Shonibare.

The show takes its title from terra preta, Portuguese for “black earth,” which refers to a type of fertile soil created by ancient Indigenous civilizations in the Amazon basin thousands of years ago. Recently rediscovered by scientists, it remains more fertile than ordinary land.

The works in Black Earth Rising are as vividly colored, dynamic, and ecstatic as they are thoughtful and moving; they inspire optimism, even as they confront the history—and future—of climate change. 

Deconstructing Nature: Environmental Transformation in the Lucas Collection
August 27, 2025 — January 4, 2026

This exhibition of more than 50 19th-century works on paper investigates how European and American artists both documented and contributed to the transformation of the environment into an industrial resource to be hoarded or shared.

Drawn from the BMA’s George A. Lucas Collection, the exhibition foregrounds the ecological issues at stake in these works and opens up new ways of understanding extractive relationships among people, including imperialism and capitalism. The exhibition is organized thematically, focusing on five specific environments and the ways artists explored them in their work: The Desert, The Forest, The Field, The City, and The Studio.

Engaging the Elements: Poetry in Nature
September 17, 2025 — February 8, 2026

This focus exhibition explores artistic engagement with the natural environment as a source of creative inspiration worth celebrating and protecting.

Approximately 25 photographs, prints, drawings, and textiles illustrate the elements of air, water, earth, and fire against broader themes of ecological awareness and preservation. These range from how artists have used visual language to convey the act of locating oneself in nature; works that depict natural forms through the physical integration of environmental components; and artists’ commentary on sites of environmental disaster, the socio-political ramifications of human impact, and the potential of symbiotic healing for this planet and its occupants.

The Way of Nature: Art from Japan, China, and Korea
September 21, 2025 — March 8, 2026

For centuries, East Asian cultures have considered human life as part of a much larger system that encompasses the natural world. More than 40 artworks from Japan, China, and Korea demonstrate a way of living where mountains and seas, animals—both wild and supernatural—and plant life and insects are symbolically meaningful and historically pervasive in visual culture. The objects range from delicate 13th-century porcelain to a luminous 18th-century embroidered silk Buddhist Priest’s Robe and large-scale 20th-century photography. Collectively, these works provide a sense of the impulse to fully experience the natural world, as foundational to our existence, as impacted by human life, and as an enduring metaphor for our survival.