Humans shape their lives alongside a world of physical things. To be grounded, rooted, or anchored means to take comfort or strength from something fixed or immutable. This contemporary group exhibition features artists who assert presence, physically and materially, while acknowledging the natural, cultural, and geopolitical forces that inspire their craft. Through sculpture, objects, and installations, the project coalesces around through lines of identity, sovereignty, the body, and the environment. The featured artists function as active agents who make evidence, using material and materiality to redress the past, reframe the present, or posit alternate futures. Using clay, fiber, film, found objects, paper, metals, and more, these makers concretize abstract concepts and shape new systems of knowledge while pointing to our shared humanity and responsibility to one another, to other species, and to the planet.

This exhibition is organized by Rachel Delphia, Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, and Alyssa Velazquez, assistant curator, with McKenzie Stupica, curatorial fellow.