Arts of the Earth

Rooted in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s Environmental Sustainability Strategic Framework, the exhibition Arts of the Earth offers a reinterpretation of the environmentally inspired art of the past decades. In addition to providing a new diverse multidisciplinary map of artistic forms, this exhibition also seeks to offer an inventory of tools, possibilities, and futures. Arts of the Earth adopts our current concern for the health of our planet, and specifically for the survival of soil as moldable, living matrix, as the cornerstone of a journey through artistic expressions crossing all geographies. It is an itinerary that connects artifacts made of earth, wood, leaves, roots, and plants—ancestral mediums that have once again risen to importance today—with the earthly interventions of recent decades that have come to be known as Land Art or Earthworks, including living anti-monuments erected in remote places, at times ephemeral, the marks of which we interpret today as prophecies of the Anthropocene.

Over these past generations, artists from starkly different cultures have asked themselves how to work the earth when it most needs care and restoration; how to offer gratitude and pay tribute; how to learn from that which it offers us at a time when it appears to be being stripped of its biological, mineral, organic and chemical richness. The constructive potential of soil and the substances that compose it takes us far beyond the classic formulations of sculpture, architecture, or landscape architecture. Over the past years, many artists have experimented with the dynamics of this substrate and have combined processes of composition and composting, drawing lines and revealing the common roots of culture and agriculture; form, formation, and terraforming. In doing so, Arts of the Earth encompasses historic works from 1970 to today and includes formats such as sculpture, installations, drawing, and performance, in addition to an extensive selection of archive materials. Spanning practices that sometimes call for multiple forms of collaborative knowledge, it looks at the intersection of agronomy, botany, geology, chemistry, and biology with the arts, architecture, and design.