Black Earth Rising: Colonialism and Climate Change in Contemporary Art

A vibrant contemporary art anthology that explores the complex ties between race, climate crisis, and colonialism by over 150 leading artists of African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American identity.

Black Earth Rising presents works by artists of African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American identity that address vital questions of land, presence, climate crisis, and social and environmental justice against the historical backdrop of European settlement of the New World. Supported by an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art curated by the author, this timely publication invites us to trace and make the connections between race, the climate crisis, and colonialism.

Works by over 150 contemporary artists are presented in three thematic sections: Reckoning, Reimagining, and Reclaiming. Complex and intertwined concepts are explored: forced migration and slavery, the environmental consequences of colonialism, the occupation of Native lands, the urban plight of Black and Brown communities, and how cultural practices and knowledge systems of indigenous peoples can change our perspectives of the natural world.

Compelling and thought-provoking, Black Earth Rising presents a discourse around climate change that situates the voices of people of color at the active center rather than on the passive periphery, and expands our understanding of aesthetic perspectives on climate change through artworks that reach to the poetic and lyrical rather than the didactic.

Learn more about the exhibition at artbma.org

235 color illustrations

Ekow Eshun is a writer, curator, journalist, and broadcaster based in London, whose writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Guardian, and Vogue. Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 2005 to 2010, and a frequent contributor to BBC radio and television programs, his previous books include Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa, Africa State of Mind: Contemporary Photography Reimagines a Continent, and In the Black Fantastic.