‘Black Earth Rising’ featuring Otobong Nkanga at the Baltimore Museum of Art, USA

12 May 2025

From 18 May – 21 September, 2025, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) will open 'Black Earth Rising', featuring Otobong Nkanga. The exhibition celebrates the transcendent power of nature through vivid and compelling works by contemporary African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American artists. Organized by renowned curator and writer Ekow Eshun, the exhibition brings together monumental paintings, sculpture, film, and mixed-media works by some of today’s most acclaimed artists, including Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Frank Bowling, Teresita Fernández, Todd Gray, Sky Hopinka, Wangechi Mutu, Otobong Nkanga, and Alberta Whittle. Together, their works evoke resplendent moments of beauty and joy even as they shed light on the effects of colonialism, cultural displacement, and climate change on the natural world. The featured artworks are as aesthetically ecstatic as they are conceptually thoughtful and moving, creating a multilayered experience that allows visitors to engage at different levels of interest.

Otobong Nkanga’s work foregrounds ecological themes of relationality and becoming through a distilled poetics of entanglement. Her multidisciplinary practice examines the complex social, political, and material relationships between bodies, territories, minerals and the earth. Unsettling the divisions between minimal and conceptual or sensual and surreal approaches, the artist’s research-based practice constellates humans and landscapes, organic and non-organic matter, Global North and Global South economies.

Find out more via the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Image: Otobong Nkanga, Meanders, 2024, Woven textile on aluminium frame, 109.9 x 130.5 x 3.8 cm, 43 1/4 x 51 3/8 x 1 1/2 in, © Otobong Nkanga, Courtesy Lisson Gallery