An exhibition opening next year at the Baltimore Museum of Art will explore the relationship between the climate crisis and colonialism.

The “Black Earth Rising” exhibition will open at the BMA on May 18 and remain on view through Sept. 21. It will comprise works by contemporary African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American artists, including Firelei Báez, Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Frank Bowling, Teresita Fernández, Todd Gray, Sky Hopinka, Wangechi Mutu, Yinka Shonibare, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

The ticketed exhibition will be part of the BMA’s Turn Again to the Earth initiative, which examines environmental issues through exhibitions, programs, and sustainability planning.

“As the world grapples with one of the most pressing issues of our time, I couldn’t think of a better interlocutor than Ekow to bring this necessary exhibition to our audiences. Black Earth Rising brings forward the boundless imagination and perspectives of incredible artists and urges us to rethink climate change through its historical roots,” said Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director, in a statement. “Black Earth Rising will also stir the senses and pull on our consciences, and hopefully provoke us to new pathways of understanding and action. Each of the exhibitions in Turn Again to the Earth are polyphonic, at turns joyful and sobering, and for all of our community, no matter your background.”

Writer and guest curator Ekow Eshun is organizing the exhibition with support from Katie Cooke, BMA Manager of Curatorial Affairs.

“Black Earth Rising brings together artists exploring questions of history, power, climate crisis, and social and environmental justice—and who are doing so through artworks of powerful insight, and great resonance and beauty,” Eshun said in a statement. “Their artworks reach to the poetic and lyrical rather than the didactic, and summon something of the joy and sorrow that comes with being denizens of a planet whose fragility becomes more apparent with each passing day.”

The exhibition is inspired by scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing’s concept of the “Plantationocene,” which traces human-made climate crisis to the rise of forced migration and labor, plantation agriculture, and global commerce fueled by colonization by European powers in the 16th century. These events, Haraway and Tsing argued, are directly tied to the social, political, and environmental inequities that persist today.

The name of the exhibition comes from the Portuguese phrase “terra preta,” meaning “black soil.” It refers to the fertile earth that Indigenous civilizations maintained through intentional soil management, and that has been degraded since the colonial period.

In addition to the “Black Earth Rising” exhibition, Eshun will release a hardcover publication with the same name. It will include works by more than 150 contemporary artists alongside essays by Eshun, art historian Anna Arabindan-Kesson, and scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris.

Organized into three thematic sections – Reckoning, Reimagining, and Reclaiming – the publication will “explore how the discourse on the environment can situate the voices of people of color at the active center rather than on the passive periphery, and expand our understanding of aesthetic perspectives on climate change,” according to a news release.

The book will be published with Thames & Hudson in May 2025.