Susan Washington

_Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s Viajando En La Franja Del Iris 2024_


Walk into almost any museum and you’ll see landscapes treated like timeless backdrops, Hudson River vistas glowing with “untouched” wilderness, Monet’s gardens in endless bloom, Ansel Adams’ mountains frozen in black-and-white. They’re beautiful, but they’re also sanitized. Rarely does a wall text say whose land that was, or what had to be erased to make it look so empty. Black Earth Rising refuses that neutrality. Here, land isn’t scenery. It’s an archive. It remembers conquest, erasure, survival, resistance - and it asks us to remember too. Organized by guest curator and renowned author, Ekow Eshun, known for In the Black Fantastic and his writing on Black identity and contemporary culture, the exhibition echoes that shift.

The title itself points to that shift. “Black Earth Rising” comes from terra preta, the nutrient-rich black soil created by Indigenous people in the Amazon long before colonization. Europeans ignored that knowledge, even as they declared the land “uncivilized.” Today, scientists look back to terra preta as a model for sustainable futures. The metaphor is clear: Indigenous knowledge has always been here, even when the official record tried to bury it.

When I walked into the show, I expected work about nature, history, survival. What I didn’t expect was how directly the exhibition tied the climate crisis to colonial history. That connection wasn’t abstract, it was written into scorched surfaces, altered maps, reclaimed archives. It was a reminder that so much of our present is built on what was taken, scarred, and erased.

And that lingers. If we don’t keep these stories visible, we forget, not just where we came from, but how we ended up here, politically, environmentally, socially. This kind of work doesn’t rest in the past. It calls us out. What happened still shapes the present, and pretending otherwise isn’t an option.


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_Jaune Quick-to-See Smith | Echo Map I_

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith makes that visible in Echo Map I. A familiar U.S. outline bleeds downward, state names replaced by scraps of language and collage, borders blurred until they seem to melt. The map stops functioning as geography and becomes testimony. Whose borders are these? Who gets to name, to erase, to redraw? I thought immediately of my own Content Not Found series, where I collect images deleted from government websites and bring them back into view. Transferring them on canvas is my way of making absence undeniable. Smith works with borders; I work with faces. Both refuse erasure.



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Teresita Fernández pushes that further through fire. Fire (America) 1 filled the room , from a distance it looked like a glowing wall, but up close I saw it was made of ceramic tiles, each one holding heat. I was mesmerized, close enough that a guard had to ask me to step back. The heat carried two truths: fire as destruction, fire as renewal. Fernández doesn’t let us choose. She layers them together, colonial violence that scorched across the Americas, and Indigenous fire as survival and knowledge. Both truths stand side by side.


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_Firelei Báez Anacaona_

Firelei Báez approaches beauty through excess in Anacaona (destroy the beauty that has injured me). A crouched crimson figure is nearly buried beneath a riot of flowers pressing down over an archival map. It’s lush to the point of collapse, and that’s the point. The colonial map underneath buckles under the weight of defiance.

Not every work centers on scars. Alejandro Piñeiro Bello’s Viajando En La Franja Del Iris feels almost dreamlike, a landscape soaked in Caribbean color that seems free from history. The land glows, luminous and alive. In this context, Bello’s work feels like a pause, a reminder that imagining futures is just as radical as naming wounds.




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_Frank Bowling - Mel Edwards Decides_
Frank Bowling’s Mel Edwards Decides takes another path. Through abstraction, maps dissolve into fields of yellow and orange. Where Smith sharpens the edges of borders, Bowling lets them fade. His work feels like both warning and possibility, geography unraveling, and with it the chance to move beyond imposed boundaries. Bowling has long been a favorite of mine, so it was incredible to see his work included here, holding its own while deepening the show’s conversation. 

Every piece in Black Earth Rising carries weight. The show refuses to separate climate from colonialism, making clear that the scars in the land are political, historical, ongoing. This isn’t over. And too many institutions still pretend otherwise.

These artists won’t let us look away. Their work doesn’t decorate. It exposes. It pulls history forward and puts it in front of us. Some pieces cut deep, some sit heavy, and a few open a door to something else, not escape, but possibility. 

Remembering doesn’t happen on autopilot. It takes effort. Black Earth Rising makes that clear: land holds memory, carries resistance, and through these works, it speaks. Forgetting only repeats the cycle. Remembering, really remembering, is where change begins.


Black Earth Rising: Climate, Colonialism, and What Can’t Be Erased

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