Humans have always felt compelled to depict the landscapes of their bodies through images and art, using them as tools to measure, document and project their existence. This act of representation provides a way to orient oneself, navigating existential position as part of a larger interconnected system of relationships.
Currently on view at the Whitney, “Shifting Landscapes” thoughtfully explores how the relationships between the human body, perception, identity and representation have evolved in response to the surrounding environment while considering the political, ecological and social implications woven into these dynamics. Featuring 120 works from the museum’s collection, the show paints a portrait of fluid and ever-changing interactions with the landscape, revealing how deeply these have been shaped—if not completely mutated—by humanity’s relentless anthropogenic interventions. These disruptions have fractured long-standing natural orders, affecting the relationship between humans, nature and other living beings in shared spaces.
The idea of shifting landscapes, while rooted in the planet’s history, has taken on new urgency in the Anthropocene. Today, the human-modified environment has reached such extremes that some now refer to this epoch as the Plastocene, a period where even plastic has become part of the geological record.
As visitors journey through the exhibition, they encounter explorations of landscapes as entirely altered, manipulated and shaped to serve human needs and perceptions. This transformation invites critical questions about how notions of land and place have been redefined in this context. One of the most consequential changes in modern history was humanity’s carving of the world into geopolitical borders and the rise of “nationhood,” tied to ideas of land ownership. These developments brought far-reaching implications on linguistic, conceptual and political levels.
Challenging this entrenched order, one of the exhibition’s early thematic sections highlights artists who reject rigid boundaries. These works embrace the idea of “borderlessness,” offering a powerful counter-narrative to escalating geopolitical and racial tensions that embraces the ceaseless movement and migration that have always been a part of human history.
Salvadoran artist Guadalupe Maravilla draws from a sixteenth-century Nahuatl manuscript documenting the Toltec and Chichimec peoples of a region now spanning Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, creating a symbolically rich series of works. These pieces weave together ancestral symbologies with migration routes traveled by fellow undocumented immigrants, forming an epic narrative of shared migratory experiences and generational trauma. The fraught and heavily contested border between the U.S. and Mexico is envisioned by the artist as an open wound carved into the land, symbolizing the deep disparities, injustices, and historical colonial trauma that define the relationship between the two Americas.
Nearby, Leslie Martinez offers a contrasting vision—one of healing and renewal. Her canvases, layered with recycled materials, evoke the natural sedimentation of time and experience while simultaneously suggesting the organic textures of mountainous landscapes illuminated by iridescent light; these powerful abstractions serve as metaphors for complex life journeys, embodying resilience and transformation. Similarly, Trey Michie’s Yo Soy Un Puente Tendido/This Is My Home pieces together fragments of found images and materials, incorporating elements of zoot suits, a flamboyant menswear style popularized in the 1930s and 1940s by African American communities and Mexican American Pachucos. By blending these fragments, Michie reflects on the personal and collective memory of the U.S.-Mexico border, while envisioning possibilities for reconciliation through a vibrant fusion of cultures.
Other artists ground their explorations in the embodiment of land and nature, creating works that reconnect humanity with the earth in a visceral, almost primal way. Amalia Mesa-Bains offers a particularly powerful example with her work Cihuateotl with Mirror in Private Landscapes and Public Territories (1997). This installation links Aztec spirituality to archetypes that transcend time and art history, centering on the figure of Cihuateotl—an Aztec spirit representing women who died in childbirth. Through the piece, she crafts a potent statement about femininity, the cycles of nature, and humanity’s need to reconnect deeply with the earth, transcending linguistic and cultural conventions to rediscover timeless truths.
A similar longing to reconnect the body with its environment and rediscover a deeper awareness of movement and perception takes center stage in the next room, where Nicole Soto Rodríguez’s captivating video unfolds. In an empty, disused building, the artist moves silently, dancing in synchrony with the birds and the ambient sounds of nature while contending with the unsettling crunch of debris beneath her feet. Part of her Abandonment Series, these site-specific choreographic exercises transform neglected spaces into poignant dialogues, reflecting on the broken promises of progress these structures once embodied and their eventual surrender to the reclaiming forces of nature.
A comparable yearning to retreat into a primal, untamed existence is evoked by Michael Joo in Salt Transfer Circle. Utilizing raw, vintage footage, Joo’s video follows a figure retreating into the forest, culminating in an immersive scene of deer moving through the wilderness. The work vividly expresses the conflicting tension between human presence and the natural world, oscillating between moments of harmony and the persistent reminders of disconnection.
A second thematic section, “Altered Topographies,” delves into the concept of New Topographics, a term coined during the 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” at George Eastman House in Rochester. This groundbreaking exhibition shifted the focus of landscape photography away from idealized, transcendent depictions of nature to man-altered environments, documenting the effects of industrialization, suburbanization, and gentrification on the American terrain. Similarly, the Whitney’s selection highlights artists who scrutinize the aftermath of human intervention in the landscape, blending personal narratives with broader societal and ecological concerns.
Artists like Christina Fernandez, the collective Piliāmoʻo, and An-My Lê use photography to critique gentrification, unchecked urban development, and destructive practices such as land exploitation, colonization, war, and pollution. Following in the footsteps of figures like Robert Adams, these artists wield their unyielding cameras to expose the lived consequences of these intrusions, transforming the land into a multilayered archive of human interaction, trauma, and injustice.
Among the most poetic works is BEND by Christina Fernandez, which positions the landscape as both an elegy and a site of cultural loss caused by colonial repression and erasure. Fernandez bridges personal and historical memory, reflecting on her native land and her displacement, a sentiment reinforced during an emotional moment when she encountered the remains of a Zapotec woman in an archaeological museum in Oaxaca shortly after her grandmother’s death. The work prompts an unsettling question: what will remain once ancient ruins and cultural memories are eradicated, leaving only those who carry these legacies in their hearts?
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The next thematic section shifts focus to New York City, examining how artists have documented, interpreted, and navigated the city’s ceaseless transformations. From the chaotic vitality of a single city block to the iconic grandeur of its skyline, New York is presented as a “concrete jungle” teeming with contradictions. The trauma of 9/11 and the alienation of life in a city that never sleeps are juxtaposed with moments of protest, resistance and the pulsating energy of its streets, vividly captured in the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Meanwhile, more introspective pieces by Salman Toor and Martin Wong portray the isolation and displacement felt by many migrant communities and minorities, tempered by their remarkable cultural resilience.
This section also features 2 Lizards, a brilliant eight-episode video series conceived by artist Meriem Bennani in collaboration with filmmaker Orian Barki during the pandemic. In the first chapter, one of the characters remarks, “To be honest, I’m kinda into this confinement thing,” encapsulating the alienation, self-imposed isolation and introspection that became emblematic of urban life during the pandemic.
After the urban perspective on human environments, a thematic section titled “Earthworks” offers a starkly different lens, exploring the visceral desire to immerse oneself in the natural world, embracing symbiosis and interconnection between human and environment. Rooted in Earth art and ecofeminism—philosophical and artistic movements of the 1960s and 1970s—the works in this chapter present alternative frameworks for experiencing our shared planet, portraying humans as integral parts of a dynamic and vital network of interdependencies.
Nancy Holt used the earth itself as her medium, collaborating with nature in her creative process and celebrating the regenerative forces of life while embracing the ephemeral, transient nature of her creations as part of the natural cycle. Other featured artists, such as Carlos Villa, Gordon Matta-Clark and Michelle Stuart, engage directly with natural forms and organic materials, using them to probe the often-fraught relationship between humans and the environment. In contrast, artists like Carolina Caycedo and Maya Lin elevate organic materials as tools to raise awareness of the delicate balance of perpetual creation and destruction that underpins all existence. Their works highlight how this natural order, essential to life, has been recklessly disrupted by human intervention.
A brief interlude in the exhibition, titled “Southern Assemblage,” highlights works born from creative intuition and improvisation by self- and community-taught Black artists in the southeastern U.S., such as Martha Jane Pettway, Joe Minter and Purvis Young. These artists use found materials, repurposed fabrics and everyday objects to craft random assemblages that reflect their surroundings. By freely and spontaneously combining these elements into deeply personal experiential patterns and textures, they transform their practice into a ritual of cultural resilience. Common materials become vehicles for preserving and transmitting stories of their origins and the places they inhabit.
The final thematic section, “Another World,” transcends the physical realm of landscape, exploring the mystical, spiritual and magical as a means to reimagine coexistence. Here, humans, animals and nature are portrayed as inhabiting one another. The section opens with Dalton Gata’s mesmerizing shamanic queer figure posed elegantly in the desert. The room then flows into Chioma Ebinama’s fluid abstractions, which integrate organic elements, and Rafa Esparza’s earthy self-portrait, where he buries himself in dirt and ground, encased with symbols of an oppressed civilization. Firelei Báez’s commanding canvas takes colonial geography and reimagines it through Dominican folklore and Taino mythology, mapping an alternative universe. The chapter culminates with Donna Huanca’s hybrid totemic sculpture, a haunting reminder of the perpetual cycle of all things, and Theo Triantafyllidis’s digital animation video BugSim (Pheromone Spa), which envisions a lush post-human, post-Anthropocene world where nature reclaims its autonomy. In this imagined future, organisms thrive undisturbed by human interference, shaping their own landscapes once again in harmony with natural cycles.
Though the exhibition assembles an extremely eclectic—and at times disjointed—collection of narratives, it ultimately presents a compelling survey of recent acquisitions that reflect a widespread sense of alienation, longing and disconnection from land, space and collective history. This alienation manifests either as a retreat into personal worlds or as escapism into imagined realms where harmonious relationships between nature and culture might still exist. While the lack of coherent threads between sections can be frustrating, the exhibition’s multiperspective approach provides a critical framework for grappling with the complex interplay of humans and nature that avoids oversimplifying and instead offers a nuanced and thought-provoking exploration of the anthropological, aesthetic, cultural, political and emotional dimensions of the ecological crises we face.
“Shifting Landscapes” is on view at the Whitney Museum through January of 2026.
