Elmhurst Art Museum Presents Group Exhibition: Sustenance & Land: Five Artists Consider Our Relationship with the Earth
This winter, from January 25 to April 27, 2025, the Elmhurst Art Museum will present Sustenance & Land: Five Artists Consider Our Relationship with the Earth, a group exhibition exploring human connection to the land and the many ways the earth sustains us.
Participating exhibition artists will include Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, Chunbo Zhang, Lydia Cheshewalla, Claire Pentecost, and Tomiko Jones. Their works, in a variety of methodologies, will address human relationships to the land, exploring a broad spectrum of themes including nutrition, cultural relationship to food, scientific investigation, spirit, history, and the future. Viewers will also find humor and creativity woven throughout their works, providing a rich tapestry of ideas about how we interact with the earth. Interim Director of the Elmhurst Art Museum Ann Quinn Kelly noted, “It will be an honor for the Elmhurst Art Museum to host this extraordinary group of artists. Their work is diverse in focus and technique. Together, the exhibition will raise meaningful considerations about our multifaceted relationship with land and how it sustains us.”
Curated by Liz Chilsen, Sustenance & Land: Five Artists Consider Our Relationship with the Earth includes Ciurej and Lochman’s Processed Views: Surveying the Industrial Landscape, a series which interprets the frontier of industrial food production and the alarming intersection of nature and technology. Chinese-born, Chicago-based artist Chunbo Zhang works explore the cultural influences and differences between Chinese and American cultures by through observations of food presentation. Her seductive watercolors of American staples, such as Chicago deep dish pizza and burgers, critically examine American consumption.
The exhibition also showcases Osage artist Lydia Cheshewalla’s intricate collages constructed of seeds. Her multifaceted, land-based practice shows a gentle care for the landscape, inspiring viewers to approach nature with curiosity and to take restorative actions for the earth. Artist Claire Pentecost’s works interrogate the imaginative and institutional structures that organize divisions of knowledge, focusing on nature, artificiality, and food systems. In Our Bodies Our Soils, Penatecost collects soil samples from a wide variety of farms and presents them in jars reminiscent of apothecary inventories or pharmaceutical processes, addressing the state of our soils and its intersection with health.
Finally, Tomiko Jones presents These Grand Places, multimedia collages that incorporate archival pigment prints, platinotypes, tri-color gum prints, cyanotypes, handwritten text, video, artifacts and performance. This series looks at public land as sites of trauma instigated by the immeasurable, but palpable, effects of human activity and climate crisis.
In addition to the Sustenance & Land: Five Artists Consider Our Relationship with the Earth exhibition, a tandem exhibition in Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House on the museum campus presents photographs from the Elmhurst Art Museum collection, including black and white photographs by Chicago photographers Joe Jachna (American, 1935-2016) and Michael Tropea. Jachna’s photographs depict the landscape in abstract compositions which impart a mysterious or otherworldly sense, while photographs by Michael Tropea capture industrial views of sites along the Mississippi River.
The Elmhurst Art Museum is open Wednesday and Thursday from 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m., Friday through Sunday, 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. For tickets and information, please call 630.834.0202 or visit elmhurstartmuseum.org.
