Collections of black-and-white photographs and etchings hang on white walls. Further on into the gallery space, a colorful figurative painting occupies a whole wall.
“The air, thick with the collective histories of resistance and trauma, lies over the landscape conspicuously absent of people,” reads the caption — written by Aaron Morgan PO ’25 and Maëlle Thomelin PZ ’25 — on the plaque of one of these photos, Dawoud Bey’s “Light on the Swamp.” “Nature becomes less a universal background but a local, storied actor in the lives of both ancestors and the living.”
Bey’s photos are some of the many artworks included in “Black Ecologies in Contemporary American Art” at Pomona College’s Benton Museum of Art. The multimedia, interdisciplinary exhibit dissects the relationships between Black people and their environments — whether natural or constructed.
“Black Ecologies” opened on Feb. 13 and runs until June 19. The Benton celebrated the show with a culinary workshop on Feb. 25, featuring Chef Martin Draluck of the Black Pot Supper Club, before its opening reception. On the 28th, the Benton, the Office of Black Student Affairs (OBSA) and the Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies (IDAS) are hosting students to explore the galleries.
Each of the exhibit’s curators — J Finley, an associate professor of Africana Studies; Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, chair of English and E. Wilson Lyon professor of the Humanities; and Victoria Sancho Lobis, the Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 director of the Benton Museum and associate professor of Art History — worked together despite coming from separate academic disciplines. Curatorial intern Tristen Alizée Leone PO ’26 also assisted in organizing the exhibit.
“All of the works deal with so many different fields, like geography and photography,” Sherrard-Johnson explained. “It brings together so many disciplines under this question of how we experience the natural and the constructed world.”
“Black Ecologies” includes a wide range of work — spanning photos, drawings, prints, paintings and sculpture — yet each comes back to a central theme: the Black body within the natural world. Colonialism, plantation slavery, urban development, climate change and other facets of racial capitalism are common references throughout the exhibit.
“[It’s] about the lens that the humanities gives us into what’s happening in the world,” Finley said. “People don’t necessarily think about the connection between art and climate change or more political issues. I think [the exhibit] gives people a way to enter that conversation in a different way.”
“So you’ve got contemporary art, but what does it mean to look at contemporary art but to also see history?” Finley said.
Many of the pieces have multiple accompanying exhibition texts, reflecting the interdisciplinary and expansive nature of the exhibit. Each label provides an interpretation of its artwork and was written by students from either Finley’s or Sherrard-Johnson’s classes, “Unruly Bodies: Black Womanhood” and “Race, Gender, and the Environment,” respectively.
“We wanted people to take different disciplinary approaches and to bring in some of the knowledge they were learning in the class,” Sherrard-Johnson said. “Whether it’s around theories of the body, around understanding environmental justice, we wanted to see them taking those ideas and filtering them through their own ideas of the work.”
Each piece seems to invite the viewer to question what nature means to them. The museum labels reflect multiple understandings and interpretations of a single work, whilst the art itself exudes history, clueing the audience into the legacies and contexts of how each Black figure depicted arrived at this present moment.
“It’s called ‘Black Ecologies in Contemporary Art,’” Finley said. “So you’ve got contemporary art, but what does it mean to look at contemporary art but to also see history?”
“Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)”, a series of prints by acclaimed artist Kara Walker, inscribes silhouetted figures on top of 1860s illustrations of the Civil War. Through this layering, Walker corrects Harper’s history via the inclusion of Black figures.
One of the first works viewers see when entering the gallery, Firelei Báez’s painting “Atabey (Or change the body that destroys me),” also superimposes a figure over a historically referential background. Painted on a nautical chart lays the Caribbean goddess Atabey; her inclusion overlays the map, correcting it, obscuring the chartered European world.
In its own correction of history, The Black Pot Supper Club held a workshop at the Benton before the “Black Ecologies” reception.
Draluck cooked and served chicken and dumplings while sharing history about James Hemings and Hercules, two Black chefs who were each enslaved by Founding Fathers — Jefferson and Washington, respectively— and are responsible for many dishes still popular today.
Lobis, Finley and Sherrard-Johnson spoke about the processes behind “Black Ecologies.”
“The exhibition is a major source of joy for me,” Lobis said. “In part because it’s the realization of a vision that I had together with Professor Sherrard-Johnson on the occasion of her course and lecture series of the same name.”
Besides the varied style and interdisciplinary approach of the exhibition itself, its development was also deeply collaborative. Starting off as a class and accompanying lecture series related to Sherrard-Johson’s research, the idea of “Black Ecologies” as an exhibit came from Lobis, who then sought Finley and Sherrard-Johnson as collaborators.
“We were really thinking about what kinds of works really exemplify this complex relationship between Blackness, Black bodies and nature or the environment from a variety of angles,” Finley said.
Given the recent wildfires in Southern California, especially within the predominantly Black neighborhood of Altadena, these themes of the complex relationship between Black bodies and the environment feel especially pertinent.
“We were getting ready to open [‘Black Ecologies’],” Sherrard-Johson said, “the fires had just taken place, especially in Altadena, and I was thinking about the ways in which you can have this environmental catastrophe that can erase history.”
The histories that “Black Ecologies” dissects remain present not only in contemporary American art but in the environment that surrounds us.
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