The Peale Museum

Thursday, March 27nd

5-6:30pm 

The Future of Here exhibition at the Peale Museum is an invitation to reimagine our place along the Jones Falls River and the Chesapeake Bay in a distant future beyond our fossil-fueled present: what local landscapes and cultures might look like in a time far beyond the Baltimore we know now, what artifacts people of that future time might produce, and how they might make creative use of the many things we leave behind. The exhibition features work made by a collective of artists and researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 2024, anchored in a class co-taught by visual artist Jordan Tierney and environmental anthropologist Anand Pandian. Please join us in a panel discussion with participants in this collective journey, as we reflect together on transforming a university class into a public exhibition, one that unites, in particular, two fields of practice: art and anthropology.

Each week last fall, we surrendered ourselves to the landscapes of our urban watershed, and our imaginations of what this place could one day become. We made our way through railway underpasses and neglected streambeds, turning our senses from the commotion of city streets to the vibrant yet unseen riverscape. We went looking for waste materials as unknown treasures, gathering them up as the foundation of our collective art studio. We imagined what these human things could one day become when our own civilization has faded away, crafting new objects and imagining the stories and significance they might carry one day. Priming our brains with poetry and ethnobotany, historical maps and speculative fictions, we tuned into the rhythms of the city’s hidden environments and the creatures who live there. We invented a new culture for the distant future and the roles its people might have, imagining how they might live with this environment and the relics of our own time. 

Join us for a discussion of the collective process that yielded this unique exhibition, hearing from both instructors and students involved in the process, as well as those whose support made this endeavor possible. Visitors will also have the chance to take in the exhibition, which closes on March 30th, and to spend some time in the exhibition maker space, fashioning artifacts of their own and reflecting on the questions and ideas explored in the exhibit.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University