Ear to the Ground

As one moves around this sculpture, six colorful glass spheres interact with light and shadow to reveal the entire spectrum of visible color

.... from brilliant blue ...

... to bright red ...

If you remain stationary, you see only a fraction of these widely varied hues. This shows us how our knowledge about the world is often limited by our individual perspective and point of view.

The artist created this sculpture during the 2016 presidential election in the United States. By celebrating the great diversity and variability of nature, it seeks to make us more accepting of difference in human culture and society.

Greek artist Mikail Karikis shot this film in a small town outside Tuscany, Italy. To create the film, he worked with a group of forty-five children from the ages of five to twelve years old over the course of six months.

Famous as the place that inspired the hellish descriptions of Dante’s inferno, this town is an active geothermal area where the hiss of steam and heat of magma constantly emanate from the earth’s core.

New York based painter Pat Steir makes elemental forces like gravity active participants in her work.

Here, white and gold paint flow like water down the surface of the canvas, following the path of gravity.

As Steir has said, “I realized that I didn’t have to use the brush, that I could simply pour the paint, that I could use nature to paint a picture of itself…that gravity would paint my painting with me.”

Iranian artist Sara Madandar created these two ripped and shredded canvases shortly after immigrating to the United States from Iran.

First, she spray painted them with patterns from silk scarves from Iran. Then, she meticulously pulled them apart thread by thread

The piece reflects on the layers of self and experience that come from moving from place to place, as well as Madandar’s own experience with the headscarf and the act of veiling.

For his 2014 performance in New York City’s Times Square, Cuban artist Jorge Otero Escobar dressed as a guarjiro—a rural Cuban farmer who listens to the earth.

Created just as Cuba began opening its borders to the United States, Escobar’s guarjiro listens for the rush of American culture towards an island that had been isolated for more than fifty years

Athena LaTocha creates her drawings as if from within the landscape itself.

Unfurling large rolls of paper on the floor, she pushes pools of ink, soil, and water across paper to create dense layers of pigment.

She then manipulates these earthen elements with industrial solvents and aggressive tools such as wire brushes, scrap metal, and reclaimed shreds of tire, capturing both the landscape’s innate power, as well as the pervasive effects of environmental degradation.

"Bulbancha" refers to the original place name for New Orleans before European colonization, and comes from a Choctaw word meaning “the place of many tongues.”

Edward Burtynsky’s photographs capture what he calls “residual landscapes”: vast swathes of land that show the impact of human industry on the natural environment in places across the globe—Nigeria, Detroit, Bangladesh, Spain, among others.

This photograph explores the impact of oil theft along Nigeria’s southern coast, showing us a ground etched with charred lines from explosives used in oil exploration and a river streaked with industrial waste in order to, as Burtynsky says, “spark a second look at what we call progress.”

Diedrick Brackens is a weaver who creates tapestries that explore gender, sexuality and race.

He is inspired by sources ranging from West African textiles, European tapestries, Southern quilt-making, the double helix shape of DNA, and the bright yellow and blue lines that demarcate freeways and rivers in contemporary Google maps

Brackens created this weaving with water sourced from the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico during several visits to New Orleans during 2018.

New Orleans based artist Courtney Egan replicates the natural movement of wind through digital means, projecting video images of swaying moss onto swatches of intricate wire mesh.

This sculpture was inspired by the sensory experience of wind moving through Spanish moss.

Demonstrating how technology can help enhance our appreciation of nature, the piece also questions how it can distract us and counter our ability to perceive its subtleties and magic.

Over the course of the exhibition, New Orleans based artist Cristina Molina hosted a series of intimate guided tours of the exhibition.

Molina guided museum visitors through a whispered exploration of the artworks in the exhibition in which she assumed the perspective of the earth, personified.

Louisiana based sculptor Clyde Connell encourages us to return to nature in times of social strife. Her sculptures layer materials like cedar, cypress, red clay, and mud with newsprint filled with headlines about war and violence.

Connell sought to transcend current events to create sculptures and paintings that offered her viewers "a ritual, protected place of the kind that animals and people always make for themselves in nature.”

This digital drawing by New Orleans based artist Dawn DeDeaux looks into a future of environmental apocalypse. It pictures human figures clad in space or hazmat suits who seem at once to be buried in earth and hopelessly lost in space.

Based on photographs of real life rescue workers from Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, these figures are a dark prophesy of earth’s demise that yet still hold on to the possibility of hope.

Ron Bechet’s large-scale charcoal drawings of the dense, tangled roots systems of trees are based on the live oak trees found throughout City Park.

Influenced by African artistic traditions in which trees are symbols for crossroads, Bechet's trees offer points of connection to hidden or forgotten pasts.

“There are questions I can’t answer,” Bechet says. “This is why I [make art].”

New Orleans based sculptor Dan Alley uses the earth as a mold. He created this sculpture by pouring molten aluminum directly on the ground so that the metal was cast in the shape of the ground beneath.

Created at the site of a major levee breach during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927—the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States—the sculpture takes the form of water spilling over the land.