BmoreArt

The first show, Watershed: Transforming the Landscape in Early Modern Dutch Art, explores how the Netherlands has been shaped by its relationship with water. About half of the 16th and 17th-century etchings and paintings relate to how the young Dutch republic transformed itself into a prosperous, early-capitalist empire by mastering the arts of shipbuilding, finance, and logistics to become a commercial power. 

Some of the works give us a view of the world through the eyes of a colonizing power, entire continents portrayed objects of desire and conquest. And so shapely women and pristine, “wild” landscapes embody the Americas and Africa in Johann Sadeler’s 1581 engravings. In Balthasar van der Ast’s still life from the 1630s, tulips, carnations, roses, and seashells stand both as objects of beauty and as commodities to be shipped, bought, and sold on a global scale. 

Perhaps the most notable piece is Frans Hals’ arresting 1644 portrait of Dorothea Berck, wife of Joseph Coymans, one of Amsterdam’s wealthiest traders and financiers. Staring unflinchingly at the viewer with a knowing smile, only one hand gloved, we get the distinct impression that Mrs. Berck was no trophy wife but likely had a hand in the management of her husband’s global empire. 

The other half of the works deal with the Netherlands’ constant struggle against water. With a third of the country lying under sea level, the battle to keep the encroaching water out through canals, trenches, fortifications, and levees never stops. Here, we mostly see images of a prosperous society that has won its war against water, the canals and rivers a peaceful backdrop to images of leisure, relaxation, and economic activity, including a small etching by Rembrandt himself. 

As the curators note, absent from these scenes of “selective naturalism,” is the endless digging and dredging, the backbreaking labor, the deforestation, and of course, the floods. Easy to miss is a small pamphlet from 1682, displayed in the middle of the room, which promises “a true and just account of the sad and sudden flood… which drowned both men, women and children, to the number of about twelve or fourteen thousand…” 

Climate change-driven sea level rise threatens to drown coastal areas all over the world, in countries rich and poor. To protect the port of Rotterdam, in the 1990s the Dutch built an enormous, mechanized storm-surge barrier, the Maeslantkering. The $500 million barrier consists of two arms, each longer than the Eiffel Tower, which shut out the ocean during high tides. We are left pondering how much of the world, which lacks the Netherlands’ long experience and wealth, will cope with the rising seas.

Close by is another, smaller, exhibition, Air Quality: The Influence of Smog on European Modernism. The curators here remind us that even as European powers were bringing much of the world into their colonial orbits, the coal-burning engines of their imperial might were literally choking their people to death in their own capitals. A helpful table alongside the artwork reminds us that particulate matter in London in the late 19th century was a whopping 616 micrograms per cubic meter, almost fifty times the average in today’s Los Angeles.

A set of pastoral paintings by Matisse, drawn from the museum’s renowned collection of the artist’s oeuvre, hints at the real reason why the artist decamped to Nice to paint every year. The air in Paris was much too dirty to provide the clear light he needed for his landscapes.

Meanwhile, Monet turned smog into an artistic asset. His 1903 painting, “Waterloo Bridge” is no doubt the main attraction in this gallery. Monet painted over forty versions of this particular London crossing, playing with light and color in ways that cemented his reputation in the Impressionist movement. As a child, I recall the first time I saw one of these Waterloo Bridge canvases, this one at the Art Institute of Chicago. The tour guide invited us to appreciate the subtlety of color as the light filtered through the “London fog.”

What strikes me now first are the giant smokestacks in the background and the ships on the foreground, all exhaling smoke and soot. Now we see the romantic “fog” for what it mostly was—a soup of toxins and carcinogens, partly responsible for the fact that average life expectancy in Britain in the 1880s was forty years. 

Air Quality helps us appreciate how far we have come in terms of controlling air pollution in the past century. But it also reminds us how little we have achieved in terms of improving air quality in many developing countries and in frontline communities, including in the United States. And of course, we are not making enough progress in eliminating what Monet couldn’t see or paint—heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

By far the largest of the three exhibitions is Crosscurrents: Works from the Contemporary Collection. What brings these 67 works together, the curators write, is how art navigates “moments of decisive change,” including civil unrest and ecological crisis. Divided into eight separate sections, the show can be confusing to navigate, but don’t worry about following any particular sequence. 

The works of the Haitian-American sculptor Abigail Lucien provide a disturbing entry point into Crosscurrents. Three of Lucien’s enamel, vinyl, and steel sculptures speak directly to the present moment, with large tracts of Los Angeles still in ashes and wildfires in the Carolinas smoldering as of this writing. “Fire on the Mountain,” “Saluting the Reign of the Sun,” and “Spirit Lays their Hand,” all from 2025, show people and animals trying to flee encroaching flames, but the cage-like structures that confine them suggest few will.

Jennifer Bartlett’s large canvas, “In the Garden #118,” presides over the Cohabitation section, which brings together works showing how nature and human society are entwined. Painting in the early 1980s in France, Bartlett may have been trying to find beauty in her “awful little garden with its leaky ornamental pool and five dying cypress trees,” as she put it. But to a present-day viewer, the rectangular pool encroached by threatening shadows, some with a slight edge of orange, can’t help but evoke recent images of Hawaiian and Californian wildfires.

At the other end of the gallery, Cynthia Daignault’s “Huntingdon Avenue,” a long canvas of eighteen Baltimore rowhomes interspersed with trees, challenges the viewer to imagine the same urban strip without the vegetation—which would make for a much harsher and more vulnerable landscape.

Expanse, a section of the exhibition devoted to immense natural spaces, is dominated by artist and musician Justen Leroy’s 2022 three-channel video installation “Lay Me Down in Praise.” In what he calls a reflection on race and environmentalism, Leroy juxtaposes breathtaking video of flowing volcanic lava and crumbling glaciers with images of Black men and women. Leroy’s original score, rooted in the musical traditions of Black America, accompanies the images and connects the Black liberation movement to the tectonic shifts taking place on the screen. 

The strongest sections, located in the heart of the exhibition space, are Elegy and Groundswell. Elegy, the curators write, gathers “objects to lament the devastating impact of war and social discord.” Jamaican artist Nari Ward’s installation, “Peace Keeper,” packs plenty of emotional punch. First shown at the 1995 Whitney Biennial to rave reviews, the installation was re-constructed in 2020 and acquired by the BMA. Ward literally tarred and feathered (with peacock feathers) a massive 1980’s Cadillac hearse, which sits atop a bed of rusted automotive pipes. Above is an oppressive canopy of car mufflers.

The installation triggers images of charred vehicles on the margins of urban riots and civil strife, signifying the breakdown of justice in the midst of oppression. “I wanted ‘Peace Keeper’ to be a kind of generative battery, to give energy to ideas about trauma and change,” Ward has said. In the context of the museum’s Turn Again to the Earth initiative, “Peace Keeper,” heavy with fossil-fuel iconography, is perhaps best understood as a fitting memorial for the hoped-for end of the hydrocarbon era, or as a funeral for everything the hydrocarbon era will take with it.

Finally, Groundswell may well be the emotional core of the exhibition, shot through with resistance, rage, and revolt. Manipulated American flags by Faith Ringgold and Kiyan Williams—including a flag that has been deep fried in oil—challenge this symbol of state power and nationalism.

Unsurprisingly, Mark Thomas Gibson’s “Biden’s Entry into Washington 2021” remains the most popular piece in the gallery. In an image that now feels prescient, a diminutive President Biden rides a blind donkey into the capital, almost washed out in the scene’s monochrome background. On the foreground, in full color, is a teeming mass of MAGA hats, insurrectionists, hooded Klansmen, provocateurs, clowns, skeletons, and a Trump ventriloquist doll.

Especially noteworthy from an ecological standpoint is Soledad Salamé’s “Gulf Distortions,” a collection of 12 screenprints depicting Louisiana’s hulking petrochemical infrastructure. The Baltimore-based, Chilean artist photographed the sites in the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which caused grievous damage to the Gulf’s bird and sea life. (A decade later, scientists are still trying to understand the effects on human health.)

Salamé then used the visual distortions generated by fax-machine transmission to give the photographs the feeling of a warning message sent but ignored. Today, these grainy images of places adjacent to Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” along with many other works in this exhibition, remind us that the threat is still there, and that nothing but a groundswell of public outrage translated into action will change it. 

In 2005, climate activist Bill McKibben lamented that climate change “hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture.” “Where are the books?” McKibben famously thundered. “The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” A decade later, novelist Amitav Ghosh noted that if writers are unable to engage meaningfully with climate change, “their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis.”

As the BMA’s Turn Again to the Earth initiative shows, the ecological crisis is now coming firmly into the center of artistic production and cultural spaces. The question now is whether this enhanced consciousness will enable us to change the direction of our carbon-burning civilization while there is still time.