Natural History

Natural History brings together a wide range of contemporary art from the museum’s permanent collection to explore artists’ engagement with nature, landscape, and the built environment. Including painting, sculpture, photography, and video works, Natural History offers a non-traditional and playful presentation of relevant themes running through contemporary art and directly engages with our neighbor, Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Collectively, the artists in the exhibition explore the ways in which humans understand and visualize our natural environment; the social and cultural meanings embedded in the tradition of landscape photography and painting; the use of natural motifs for formal experimentation; environmentalism; and the legacy of Romanticism, as it pertains to nature and the sublime. Artists include  John Divola, Mel Bochner,  Laura Owens, Fischli & Weiss, Ed Ruscha, Paul Thek, James Welling, Roe Ethridge, Carsten Höller, Richard Hughes, Florian Maier-Aichen, Valeska Soares, Vija Celmins, Llyn Foulkes,  Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Rachel Harrison.