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Champion’s photographs appeared throughout the path like windows into mythological memories. In “Sirens #16” —projected on a wall as big as a movie screen—two Black women sunning themselves enfold into a sort of phoenix shape on rocks as muddy water curls around them. “Joyell Redemption #62″ centers on a dark-skinned woman wearing white; she piles her locs into a crown with one hand and looks elsewhere, off into the lush green landscape that surrounds her. In one from the “Oshun Series”, inspired by the Yoruba river goddess, the deity is dressed in yellow and facing the texture of water rather than us. In later photographs, she is entirely submerged, the colors of skin and dress rippling into blue. 

Next instruction: “honor all of our origins: ask someone where they were born.”

“I want this to feel like you’re opening up a storybook,” Champion told me when we met the day before. “And in the storybook, there are games to play, there are things for you to look at and look for… You’re part of this story. I don’t necessarily want you to see the world through my eyes, I want to bring you here so that you can see it through your own.” 

Since 2022, the Voyages series brings two Baltimore-based artists a year to the National Aquarium. In addition to the one-night-only interactive experience the artists and their chosen collaborators create for an audience—the evening includes food and drinks by local vendors and an after-party featuring local performers. It is a celebration of and for Baltimoreans (though everyone is welcome) and not to be missed. But even all this is just one small part of the whole. 

The vision for Voyages began as the Aquarium saw a need to reimagine what had been its long-running lecture series, supported since the 1990’s by the Marjorie Lynn Bank Endowment. The lecture series had brought in nationally renowned speakers like zoologist and primatologist Jane Goodall and marine biologist Sylvia Earle. Though in recent years, engagement had begun to decline as people could access more and more information online. And then the pandemic hit. 

“It was really during COVID, when we were called to think of the new normal, not just COVID but the racial reckoning that was happening at the time,” remembers Jennifer Hamilton, Director of Community Partnership Strategy at the National Aquarium. 

The Aquarium listened to the perspectives of Baltimore residents, many of whom went on to become part of a community advisory group, as they brainstormed a different direction for what they called in the interim “The New Thing.” Hamilton remembers they asked, “How can we change how we operate, how we communicate? What can we do differently in this new normal moment—still fulfilling that intent that the Bank family had, that passion of Marjorie’s to connect Baltimoreans to these world-renowned experts?” 

The answer they embarked upon: invite Baltimore-based artists to an immersive four to six month-long residency. In this time, they would have access not only to the Aquarium exhibits open to the public, but its behind-the-scenes spaces and in-house experts. As artists honed in on areas of interest or query, the Aquarium team would also help to organize field trips, provide reading recommendations, and offer connections with scientists who could deepen their study. “For all artists, we allow their process to play out and for the research to go in whatever direction resonates as they learn new information,” Hamilton describes.

Central to Champions’ research was scale and interconnectedness. She looked at individual species, then ecosystems, and the ways, globally, humans are a part of ecosystems too. She queried, “Who’s in the room when we discuss land and water conservation? Who’s being protected? Who is doing the protecting? And what’s being protected? Are we looking to nature itself to help us design better ways of living?” She was concerned with the collective loss caused by indigenous voices being historically muted. As a Black woman, she also considered the voices and traditions of her own family and history.

“I was thinking about the ways in which we from different communities navigated teaching other people about anything environmentally related in the past,” Champion says. “We told stories. It is how you get your myths and your deities and your gods and goddesses. They may have different names, they may be different stories, but we’re essentially talking about the same thing. And that’s part of what I want people to understand—we need to have the same goal, and that’s the protection of the planet we live on.”

The Aquarium connected Champion with Angelo Villagomez, Senior Fellow at Center for American Progress—one of the leading progressive think tanks in Washington, DC. As an Indigenous Pacific Islander from the Western Pacific, his work focuses on Indigenous-led conservation and ocean justice. He advocates, “The who will change the how. The how will change the outcome.” That idea resonated so much with Champion, she projected the quote for her audience at the end of our scavenger hunt. 

Of course, Villagomez’s words intend to call attention to the importance of cultural and racial representation within conservation movements, but framed within Voyages, this quote also echoed, for me, the very experiment of the residency. What happens when we integrate artists into spaces and movements typically dominated by scientists? 

With all our peculiarities and originalities (upon which artists do pride ourselves), can the collective potential of our perspective and creative work be hypothesized? 

I looked back to previous chapters of Voyages for some insight. In inaugural Chapter 1, Vymatics, Baltimore beatboxer, breath artist, and vocal percussionist Dominic “Shodekeh” Talifero in collaboration with Erica Hanson took audiences on a bioacoustic journey through the Aquarium’s exhibits. With wireless headsets and cymatics (the visual representation of sound) attendees got to tune into the many layers of communication and vibrations between animals and other life in nature that humans are usually not privy to. In Chapter 2, Will the Great Water Remember, Jessica Keyes and Patrick McMinn—working with Imani Black, CEO and founder of Minorities in Aquaculture and shellfish aquaculture biologist—wrote, produced, and performed a four-part composition inspired by the ecosystems, tides, filtering, and schooling in the Chesapeake Bay. 

In the residency that led to Chapter 3: Neutral Buoyancy, experiential artist and shaman Nicoletta Daríta de la Brown got to swim (and film) in the giant tanks of the Aquarium’s Animal Care and Rescue Center—where current and future animals receive care and acclimation—as she explored water as a modality of healing and restoration. Chapter 4, drag artist Devon Vaow held a queer lens to the study of adaptation in: Drag Me to Survival. Working with featured environmentalist, community organizer, and fellow drag performer, Wyn Wiley (aka Pattie Gonia), Vaow delivered audiences the transformational experience that is a drag show behind-the-scenes. 

“They’re all completely different,” Hamilton says of the Voyages chapters so far. “But the words ‘childlike wonder’ come up with all of them. That’s what the artists want to invoke in attendees—inviting adults back to play, realizing the power in being in that space when it comes to learning and engaging with really important ideas. Most of the artists independently come to this. And when they do, we’re like, well, let’s talk about why everything that the Aquarium does is rooted in this hopeful, joyous optimism that we’re trying to build in conservationists.” 

Sarah Doccolo, Community Programs Manager at the National Aquarium, expands on that why—“Joy in activism is so necessary and so vital to motivating all of us to sustain.” She believes a large part of what impedes conservation progress is the way the news amplifies doom and gloom or falls into the language of war (i.e. COMBAT climate change!). “Statistically,” she tells me, “it shuts people down.” 

Moving away from that, Doccolo advocates looking toward a “climate renaissance” instead. The words brightened us both as she said them. “You can acknowledge the reality and the severity while still rooting—celebrating nature and loving it and rekindling your connection with it. Just making space to do that is, I think, what’s going to change us.” 

“And so, while Voyages is and can be just a really fun party at the Aquarium, it is also rooted in a very, very big concept that means a lot to me,” Doccolo adds. “We need to have fun while thinking about the ocean so that the next day maybe I will make a better decision that will connect back to remembering our waterways and where my trash goes. You can make those connections more easily if you’re celebrating them.”

Bringing Doccolo’s words back to Champion’s scavenger hunt, those sunstruck deities, I realize she’s articulated it: how and why artists (of all stripes) are vital to the climate renaissance. Art eases us out of our change-dread, defies indifference, invites us to play and be curious again. More broadly—and not to exclude the potential of creative work that doesn’t intend to be playful—art engages. Offering new routes back to our senses, it lets us see, hear, touch, feel our world anew. 

For conservation organizations, engagement with the arts can also be the key to broader and more viable audiences, deepening public understanding of a respective mission, and bringing new sources of oxygen to activism. In other words: the National Aquarium’s experiment has yielded what I would call conclusive results. For local artists, the city of Baltimore, and the well-being of our planet—Voyages is a very good New Thing. I hope the teams of other STEM institutions, and you too, have reserved your tickets for the next Chapter. 

Update since this article’s original publication: In November 2024, Voyages Chapter Six featured recording artist and performer, Dan Deacon who worked with scientist Fred Tutman, founder of the Patuxent Riverkeeper.

Upcoming on July 17, 2025, Voyages Chapter Seven will feature Submersive Productions. For more information and to get your tickets, click here.