“Let Us Feel Heartbreak,” reads a quote by the healer-poet Deena Metzger included in the lower right corner of the artist Andrea Bowers’s drawing from her Eco-Grief Extinction series on view in this gallery. The poetic phrase, like Bowers’s artwork, contemplates the experience of loss that arises from the devastation of vital ecosystems, while exhorting us to care for the earth. Taking a cue from Bowers and Metzger, this installation considers the evolving role contemporary art plays in relation to the natural environment, offering compelling ways to reflect on our intertwined relationships with land, air, and water.

Bowers aligns her artistic practice with the legacy of environmental and ecofeminist art, which first emerged during a period of heightened political activism in the late 1960s across the globe. Environmental art is a heterogeneous category spanning conceptual, performative, sculptural, photographic, and filmic works that engage the land as raw material, as socially and politically charged, and as symbolically meaningful. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, whose Book of the Seven Lagoons is on display here, are among the forerunners of environmental art, creating work focused on the tensions between human land use and ecological needs. Their handmade book interprets the ecosystem of the Pacific Rim, including interactions between food production and watersheds, through text, hand-painted photographs, and maps.

Many of the artworks on view here pointedly engage with the genre of landscape, probing the varied political, social, and aesthetic agendas projected onto landscape imagery. With his photograph of China’s massive Ertan dam, for example, Armin Linke explores notions of the contemporary sublime, evoking sensations of awe and fragility in the face of an entirely human-made environment. Themes of environmental destruction, extraction, displacement, and social justice run throughout the artworks in this gallery, representing distinct perspectives on how we navigate, respond to, and preserve the living world.

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