The Jones Falls 2076 exhibition at The Peale explores alternative futures for Baltimore’s Jones Falls River, as imagined by artists, designers, writers, and community members.
Baltimore’s founding river has been hidden below I-83 for over 50 years, overlooked and mistreated. This waterway made possible the rise of Baltimore as an American industrial powerhouse. And yet it is out of sight and out of mind for many residents of the city and region. As the elevated expressway covering the Jones Falls nears the projected end of its lifespan, more and more Baltimoreans are imagining and asking for a different future for the river.
Jones Falls 2076 centers on 14 newly-commissioned speculative works that envision a radically restored and reimagined Jones Falls in the year 2076. These works reframe the Jones Falls to come half a century from now through the lens of possibility, imagining the river unburied, reconnected, repaired, and recentered as the ecological, social, and civic heart of Baltimore. The works also ask deeper questions about our relationships to the river, its human and non-human neighbors, and to future generations.
Supplementing these works is a survey of previous plans, visions, and depictions of the Jones Falls from the 1800s through the present, from designs to tame, bury, and divert the river, through more recent proposals to daylight and reclaim the waterway.
Jones Falls 2076 is the second of two exhibitions presented by the Jones Falls 2076 project, following Confluence at AREA 405 this spring, and represents a culmination of the project’s year of activities. Building on Jones Falls 2076’s widely-attended River Reimagining Workshops, the new exhibition also features new participatory design opportunities that invite visitors to share their own visions.