Sustenance & Land: Five Artists Consider Our Relationship with the Earth

This winter, the Elmhurst Art Museum presents Sustenance & Land: Five Artists Consider Our Relationship with the Earth, a group exhibition exploring human connection to the land and the many ways the earth sustains us. Participating artists Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, Chunbo Zhang, Lydia Cheshewalla, Claire Pentecost, and Tomiko Jones work in a variety of methodologies addressing human relationships to the land, exploring a broad spectrum of themes including nutrition, cultural relationship to food, scientific investigation, spirit, history, and the future. Humor and creativity are woven throughout, guiding viewers through a rich tapestry of ideas about how we interact with the earth. Curated by Liz Chilsen, Sustenance & Land: Five Artists Consider Our Relationship with the Earthtakes place at the Elmhurst Art Museum, 150 South Cottage Hill Avenue, from January 25 to April 27, 2025.

Interim Director of the Elmhurst Art Museum Ann Quinn Kelly says, “It will be an honor for the Elmhurst Art Museum to host this extraordinary group of artists. Their work is diverse in focus and technique. Together, the exhibition will raise meaningful considerations about our multifaceted relationship with land and how it sustains us.” 

Highlights of the exhibition include Ciurej and Lochman’s Processed Views: Surveying the Industrial Landscape, a series which interprets the frontier of industrial food production and the alarming intersection of nature and technology. Also featured is Ciurej and Lochman’s Recipes for Disaster, a 68-page book of recipes that address the dangers of the climate crisis.

Chinese-born, Chicago-based artist Chunbo Zhang explores cultural influences and differences between Chinese and American cultures by looking at food presentation. Her seductive watercolors of American staples, such as Chicago deep dish pizza and burgers, critically examine American consumption.

Osage artist Lydia Cheshewalla presents intricate collages constructed of seeds. Her multifaceted, land-based practice shows a gentle care for the landscape, inspiring viewers to approach nature with curiosity and to take restorative actions for the earth.

Claire Pentecost interrogates the imaginative and institutional structures that organize divisions of knowledge, focusing on nature, artificiality, and food systems. In Our Bodies Our Soils, Penatecost collects soil samples from a wide variety of farms and presents them in jars reminiscent of apothecary inventories or pharmaceutical processes, addressing the state of our soils and its intersection with health.

Tomiko Jones presents These Grand Places, multimedia collages that incorporate archival pigment prints, platinotypes, tri-color gum prints, cyanotypes, handwritten text, video, artifacts and performance. This series looks at public land as sites of trauma instigated by the immeasurable, but palpable, effects of human activity and climate crisis. 

Finally, a tandem exhibition in Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House on the museum campus presents photographs from the Elmhurst Art Museum collection, including black and white photographs by Chicago photographers Joe Jachna (American, 1935-2016) and Michael Tropea selected from a gift to the Museum from the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation. Jachna's photographs depict the landscape in abstract compositions which impart a mysterious or otherworldly sense, while photographs by Michael Tropea capture industrial views of sites along the Mississippi River.

ABOUT THE CURATOR
Liz Chilsen leads the Exhibitions and Collections programs at the Elmhurst Art Museum. She has organized over 50 exhibitions, including at the Chicago City Gallery in the Historic Water Tower, Chicago Transit Authority’s InTransit Gallery, and at Columbia College Chicago among others. She is founder of “Lessons of Place,” a long-term photography project that explores human relationship to place. For over two decades she taught in the Departments of Photography, Humanities, and Journalism at Columbia College Chicago. She holds an MFA in Photography, and a BS-Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Image: Tomiko Jones, These Grand Places. Digital Image collage: BW photograph with cyanotype overlay. 2020. Dimensions variable