Madeline Murphy Turner writes about a recent installation she curated, Drawn to Earth: Contemporary Art and Environment in the Americas, now on view through October 5, 2025.

Drawing has played a crucial role in the conception of the Americas as a territory. Due to the medium’s accessibility in outdoor settings and ease of circulation, artists and scientific explorers during colonization often sketched landscapes that deceptively portrayed the land as uninhabited. They also used drawing to record and classify the plants and related specimens they encountered across the region, implementing the medium to categorize a world that was unfamiliar to the European eye. Later, as independent nations in the Americas formed, the landscape genre and the scientific study of land became tools for countries to shape their identity in relation to the ground they occupied. 

The legacy of drawing in the Americas as it relates to the environment brings us to the present day, when contemporary artists are turning to the medium to question this history. Drawn to Earth: Contemporary Art and Environment in the Americas features works (most of which are new acquisitions) by 11 artists, and it asks how and why artists in the Americas today utilize the practice of drawing to address topics of land, territory, ecological crisis, and our own relationship as humans to the other-than-human world. On view in Gallery 1120, the installation is guided by intersecting themes that engage with and revise historical approaches to drawing as a medium tied to picturing the entanglement of land, plants, water, and humans.  

Some of these artists use the genre of landscape drawing to subvert it or to disregard its representational schemas completely in favor of their own strategies and cosmo-visions. Artist Terran Last Gun draws colorful geometric forms on top of historical ledgers once used to record the exchange of goods and services. The artist’s contemporary markings are inspired by the visual iconography of lodges painted by members of the Blackfeet tribe. Discs and triangles like the ones found in Reconstructing the West and Approaching New Spaces (both 2022) are central to cosmological histories of the Blackfeet’s relationship with earth and sky, and such imagery continues to hold ceremonial and cultural significance today. Last Gun’s contemporary approach to historical ledger drawing takes the practice in a new direction through geometric forms. By marking over ledgers that detail non–Native American histories of economy and ownership, he inserts his own perspective into an official historical record that has excluded Indigenous peoples. 

Other artists turn to botanical illustration to evaluate and critique taxonomy’s harmful impact—not only on the environment, but on people who are minoritized due to their race, gender, or sexuality. In her series El orden de los factores (Cosecha de mujeres) [The Order of Factors (Harvest of Women)] from 2022, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki paints portraits of contemporary Peruvian women over printed facsimiles. The facsimiles reproduce images of botanical drawings made between 1783 and 1817 during the Royal Botanical Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada. Led by Spanish botanist José Celestino Mutis, this expedition to present-day Colombia and Ecuador was financed by Spain. The Peruvian women portrayed were disappeared during the 2020 Covid pandemic, a period that saw a sharp increase in gender-based violence. Bringing together two events and time periods into one artwork, the artist explores how the scientific study of humans and plants in the 18th and 19th centuries created a hierarchy that empowered white European Christian men and exploited women, Indigenous people, and the natural world. 

Drawn to Earth also seeks to expand the definition of contemporary drawing, presenting practices that incorporate elements such as water and natural inks as protagonists in the creative process. For example, Jimena Croceri translates the practice of drawing into actions that highlight the flow of water. She plays with its unpredictable fluctuations, which are what ultimately determine the final composition.

Exhibited artists include Laura Anderson Barbata, Jimena Croceri, Teresita Fernández, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Joseph Hardesty, Jim Hodges, Terran Last Gun, Marisol, Joiri Minaya, Rosana Paulino, and Daiara Tukano. 

The installation is accompanied by an audio tour, in Spanish and English, available on Bloomberg Connects. 

Madeline Murphy Turner is the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Drawings at the Harvard Art Museums.