Human Impact focuses on the pressing issues facing the natural environment of New England and the global world. Featuring a group of national and internationally recognized artists, the exhibit examines our shifting perspectives and connection with the land during a time of dramatic ecological change and human advancement.

With nature as the setting – its forests, plants, lakes, and the air we breathe – these artists convey personal narratives and critical reflections of our complicated relationship to our environment, which will inform and shape the destiny of future generations. Probing complex environmental, social, political, and economic issues entwined with our shared ecology, the artwork in Human Impact reveals our ever-evolving connection to – and power over – nature.

Featured Artists: Diane Burko, Adriane Colburn, John Gerrard, Renée Greenlee, Kari Greer, Nicolei Buendia Gupit, Sallie Dean Shatz, and Rebecca McGee Tuck

image: Sallie Dean Shatz, Union Pacific's Rock-filled Causeway, from Learning Humility from a Dying Lake series, 2024

image: Kari Greer, Thomas Fire, Camino Cielo above Montecito, California, 2017

image: Nicolei Buendia Gupit, In The Age of Abundant Scarcity, 2023

Human Impact: Contemporary Art and Our Environment is supported in part by the Mellon Foundation Public Humanities Labs Initiative on Migration through the Axinn Center for the Humanities at Middlebury College and the UVM Office of Research and Economic Development. BCA Spring exhibitions are supported in part by the Maslow Family Foundation. Hospitality sponsor: Lake Champlain Chocolates. Burlington City Arts is supported in part by the Vermont Arts Council & the National Endowment for the Arts.