What meanings has Earth held for people of African descent, and what can an environmental consciousness grounded in Pan-Africanist perspectives teach all of humanity today?

Conceived to accompany the major survey exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (on view at the Art Institute December 15, 2024–March 30, 2025), this exhibition, drawn from the museum’s collection, addresses the planet itself. Works by 17 artists in film, photography, and book arts draw attention to three vital and intertwined interactions with the land: as a path to freedom, as a means of spiritual and bodily sustenance, and as a source of enlightenment.

Works by artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Dawoud Bey retrace nocturnal paths to freedom. For example, Weems’s North Star stems from the experience of her grandfather, labor organizer Frank Weems, who made a path from rural Arkansas to Chicago in 1936 by traveling at night and following Polaris, the North Star. Like many others who found their way to freedom, Weems saved his life but lost his family and never could return to his birthplace.

Foregrounding the interrelation of food and spiritual wisdom are works by Radcliffe Bailey and Luis Medina as well as the room-filling photo installation Bori (Feed the Head) by Candomblé priest and visual artist Ayrson Heráclito. Bori memorializes a ritual performance in which Heráclito encircled the heads of one dozen initiated participants with mounded ingredients to nourish individual Yoruba deities.