An exhibition’s focus on extraction landscapes in African exposes the globalization myth that we all live in the same place, in the same way.
By Zoe Edgecombe
Two stories below ground, an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art looks deeply (literally) at issues of landscape in Africa. With approaches ranging from land art to film to textiles, the artists in Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa are tackling intensely local topics, like mining and deforestation, that have profound but often invisible global significance.