In an era of constant discussion about climate change, rising sea levels, land degradation, energy use, and competition for land rights, the National Museum of African Art show Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa takes on a topic of urgent public interest. Curator Karen Milbourne has broken the exhibition into different conceptual approaches to “earth”— as a source for art materials or material wealth, the home of both human and ancestral realms in many cosmologies, and a place for geopolitical debates about ownership, identity, and belonging. The result is a show that asks many important questions, and reveals how different cultures across time and a vast geography have responded to them.

The exhibition opened on Earth Day 2013, a date carefully chosen to underscore the ecological focus of sections of the show. The architecture of the National Museum for African Art (NMAfA) and the curator’s pioneering use of the Smithsonian gardens are equally well suited to the exhibition theme. In the gardens along Independence Avenue and in front of the Smithsonian Castle, thought-provoking installations are set among plots of flowers and hedges. Internationally acclaimed artist El Anatsui, who has had a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum and an installation in the High Line this year, contributed a piece titled Ala (2013). Ala references the elaborate, yet impermanent, altar complexes called Mbari, a devotional tradition in Igbo areas of Nigeria in which clay sculptures of the gods are created in earthen architecture and then left to return to the earth. The rusting metal cassava-graters that form the walls of Anatsui’s installation were extracted from and are now slowly returning to the earth, and the beautiful ocher color connects the piece with the exterior façade of the Smithsonian Castle. Ghada Amer’s Hunger (2013)—a plot of rice planted in the shape of the word “hunger”—rewards repeat visits. At the opening events, the seeded earth made a clear statement; with the passing of time the rice grew and blurred the contours of the letters, the subtle differentiation of the installation from the ornamental grasses of the garden inviting closer inspection and introspection. From the gardens, the visitor walks down into the galleries of the NMAfA. On the first subterranean level, one passes a small show on the art of Gabon to honor the Gabonese Republic as major funders of the Earth Matters exhibition. Proceeding further down into the earth, the visitor reaches the entrance to the show. The setting is evocative, especially when considering artworks that reference mining or the power of ancestors buried in the ground.

The entrance to Earth Matters centers on an arresting video installation, Berni Searle’s Seeking Refuge (2008). The artist appears in a seaside landscape predominated by varied gray tones in the water, sand, and rocks. Her black wrap and red, henna-dyed feet punctuate this sea of gray, and we see the artist move from the water inland, over ice and snow, and finally resting in a shallow depression on the gray, rocky shore where the inky silhouette of her body makes a black hole in the bleak emptiness. Searle’s piece, set in the Canary Islands, highlights the plight of migrants and refugees seeking a new place to call home; other artworks in the opening gallery also deal with geopolitical themes. Andrew Putter’s Hottentot’s Holland: Flora Capensis 2 (2008) reprises the Dutch pronk still-life style, but subverts the exotica-focused genre by featuring plants and materials native to South Africa before European arrival. Putter’s work is a visually lovely meditation on the shifting, difficult, and politically motivated definitions of local and foreign, quotidian and exotic. Jide Alakija’s Invisible Cities #1 (Bombay) (2008, 2013 exhibition print) captures informal habitations in Lagos, Nigeria. The incongruous title emphasizes the ubiquity of urban sprawl and the inadequate land rights of marginalized people across the globe. Art objects without an overt political theme are also included in the entry gallery, including a mid- to late twentieth-century Karamojong Men’s Wig, its curving volumes and lofty feathers brought together with painted earth. The remainder of the exhibition is organized in a similar way, with contemporary artworks providing the narrative and helping to define the theme of each subsection, and art from earlier periods illustrating the long history of philosophies about the earth and its connection to life.

In the section “Art as Environmental Action,” artists’ concerns about environmental issues are explicit. We Are Destroying Planet Earth (2007) by Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh features the words of the title surrounded by dying butterflies and terrified cartoon characters running away from an unidentified menace. Santu Mofokeng’s South Beach, Replacing of Sand Washed Away During the Floods and Wave Action, Durban from his 2007 Climate Change series asks a direct question about the sustainability of sand replacement, which may be of particular interest to U.S. museum-goers in the nation’s capital, given the ongoing impact of Hurricane Sandy. Hanging above the sobering questions about sustainability and degradation, Georgia Papageorge’s Kilimanjaro/Cold Fire video (2010) provides a somber soundtrack, with music that at times verges on threatening. Scenes of the melting snows of Kilimanjaro are screened next to video of the illegal charcoal trade in central Africa, tying together the impact of one economic sector on another—logging and tourism—and the interruption of the water cycle in both places. The wonderful 2001 Kemmoussa, by Younès Rahmoun, is perhaps the most subtle piece in this section. Rahmoun collected discarded plastic bags he found littering the cities of Morocco and tied them into tiny spheres. Thus transformed thorough a process he calls “aesthetic recycling,” the bags are hung in perfectly straight lines that call to mind Muslim prayer beads. Kemmoussa is installed near El Anatsui’s Erosion (1992), a towering wooden column. The exterior is covered with burnt-in symbols and ideograms, the delicate patterns spiraling up the exterior of the column, but roughly halted where the chainsaw slashed through different layers of wood. Made for an Earth Summit residency in Rio de Janeiro, the piece seems to reference the cultural destruction occasioned by ecological devastation. The forceful compositions and titles of most works in “Art as Environmental Action” seem almost too didactic when clustered together. This tone creeps into the entrance wall of the exhibition, where visitors are informed, one hopes unnecessarily, that “Africa Matters. Art Matters. Earth Matters.”

Moving to the rear of the large gallery, the “Strategies of the Surface” section explores the contested terrain of the African continent as well as the beauty of its topography. Allan deSouza’s Divine2055, Divine6036, and Divine1881 (2008) are mirror-image prints of photographs taken from airplane windows, creating weird and perfect symmetries. In contrast to this absorbing meditation on the beauty of the surface, IngridMwangiRobertHutter’s Static Drift (2001) negotiates assumptions about race and space. Ingrid Mwangi, who has both Kenyan and German ancestry, stencils her own body by tanning around silhouettes of maps, challenging the associations between arbitrary delineations of the surface, whether skin color or nation-state. Artworks like Sammy Baloji’s Portrait #2: Femme Urua sur fond d’aquarelle de Dardenne (2011) and the pairing of Graeme Williams’s The screen at the Top Star Drive-in Theatre on an old mine dump, Johannesburg, South Africa (2010) with Jacob Hendrik Pierneef’s South West African Mountains (1944) address the early European myopia that saw Africa for its land, without noticing its residents. Baloji layers Francois Michel’s photograph of a beautiful young Luba woman with a piercing gaze over the soft watercolor lines of Leon Dardenne’s vision of Katanga, two images of the region recorded on the same 1898–1900 Belgian colonial expedition. The photographer—also serving as taxidermist—and the painter each separated the land from the peoples of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rather than acknowledging local ownership of the land. Pierneef’s painting reflects the same willful blindness, his idealized empty landscape contrasting with the desolation of a defunct mine featured in Williams’s photograph.

Throughout the exhibition, Milbourne includes historical art traditions alongside contemporary art, a powerful statement about the equality of and relationship between art forms that are usually shunted into separate “traditional” and “contemporary” boxes, irrespective of their date of creation. This strategy is particularly useful when it highlights the continuity of artists’ interests in the earth as medium or conceptual space. In the “Strategies of the Surface” section, however, the connection is tenuous. A beautiful mid- to late nineteenth-century Luba Lukasa, both a mapping and a pneumonic device, is placed near early twentieth-century Kenyan Kigango, or funerary posts. Although both traditions have to do with marking the surface of the earth, their multivalent connections to different cultural beliefs sit uneasily alongside the pointed statements of other artwork nearby. The natural limits of wall labels, and the crowded display in this area, combine to make these excellent pieces serve as foils for the brighter colors and more confrontational messages of contemporary photography, video installation, and paintings. Throughout the rest of the exhibition, however, this comparison of different periods and media reinforces the centrality of the earth to diverse art practices.

Moving further along the back wall of the gallery, the William Kentridge film Mine (1991) provides a mournful soundtrack for the section of the exhibition entitled “Imagining the Underground.” Here, visitors encounter artworks exploring the underground—from the impact of mining on the environment and the rights of miners to the conceptual place of the underground in different cosmologies. George Osodi’s De money series no. 1 (2009) features informal gold miners in Obuasi, Ghana, where out-of-work youth seek gold despite personally dangerous conditions and unintended communal consequences, such as water pollution. Osodi’s exposure makes the reddish earth glow like gold, and the scale dwarfs the men involved, highlighting their vulnerability. This section of the exhibition deftly draws out the complexity of historical thought about the earth. An excellent nineteenth-century mask with a superstructure of abstracted spiders joins a bowl and bracelet with the same theme, all from the Grasslands kingdoms of Cameroon; these are placed across from a sixteenth-century plaque of mudfish commissioned by the kings of Benin, Nigeria. These artworks point to a common focus on animals that tunnel into the earth and also appear on its surface as messengers. Despite separation by 550 miles, Benin and Grasslands kings shared a sense that these creatures of two worlds were connected to the supernatural, whether ancestors or powerful gods. A selection of Kongolese Minkisi (sing. Nkisi), figures that use grave earth to connect the living with the wisdom of the dead, is paired with a lushly painted, haunting series by Christine Dixie, Even in the Long Descent I–V (2007), that imagines a Xhosa family buried beneath the land claimed by white settlers in the Xhosa wars of 1779–1879. Both the Minkisi and the paintings meditate on the earth as a resting place for ancestors and a synecdochic medium for the ancestors’ influence on the present.

The main gallery is organized in a loop, and the “Power of the Earth” section either begins or closes the visitor experience of the exhibition. This section includes challenging artworks—including Wangechi Mutu’s Sprout (2010), a nineteenth-century Punu Reliquary Ensemble, and a late nineteenth to early twentieth-century Healing Figure—that echo concerns about human relationships with the earth over the past century. The art in this section stresses the complexity of that relationship as one that nourishes life but also has the potential to threaten it, and represents the earth as an entity that is simultaneously maternal and familiar while also supremely powerful and overwhelming. In Mutu’s piece, a female form is seemingly planted headfirst in the earth, her arms reaching into the ground, her legs and pudenda blooming with new growth above. The arresting composition seems to equivocate between the life-giving connection between the figure and the earth, and the figure’s sacrifice as fodder for new growth. The Punu artist also has a beautiful woman rising or growing from the ensemble wrapped around her waist and legs, the powerful grave earth and relics tied to her with a curving vine. The powerful, upright Teke sculpture encased in an earthen pack that expands his torso seems to draw strength from this combination of sacred materials, although it also immobilizes his arms and therefore diminishes his bodily strength. Here, the combination of art from this century and the last provides new ways of thinking about all of the artists’ choices, making this one of the strongest subthemes in the installation.

The accompanying catalogue further refines the open-ended questions presented in the exhibition. Earth Matters tackles a highly charged and wide-ranging discourse about the earth and our relationship to it. Milbourne should be congratulated for showcasing the contribution of many artists and thinkers to these complex issues, and for highlighting how our stewardship of the earth—or lack thereof—ties together both North American and African audiences.