Black Earth Rising, edited by Ekow Eshun

Black Earth Rising: Colonialism and Climate Change in Contemporary Art

Edited by Ekow Eshun

Thames and Hudson, 2025

You will need a sturdy coffee table for this weighty—in pounds and ideas--new book from Thames and Hudson, a pre-eminent publisher of hybrid works that are sumptuous with images, substantial with expert texts.  Sturdy and easily accessible for study, too, because many of the more than 200 photographs and paintings reproduced here will probably be unfamiliar and will require several viewings for most readers, this reviewer included.  Fortunately, from the subtitle onward, Black Earth Rising offers guidance--an introduction by the distinguished curator/editor Ekow Eshun and essays by two other scholars.  The works collected in this large-format and elegantly arranged book are by “artists of African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American identity.”

“Black Earth,” one immediately learns, has a double meaning, literal and figurative.  “Black earth” is a translation of terra preta, a “type of highly fertile soil found over areas of the Amazon Basin” created by Indigenous people who added charcoal, compost, manure, and bones to the land.  In the book, the term comes to stand for agricultural practices of Blacks, Browns, and Indigenous people in the Americas before colonialism.  These practices now offer alternatives to plantation and industrial agriculture that Eshun and the other writers connect to climate change.  A “Rising” of the “Black” older methods—as well as the principles implicit in them--could help stem the rising of sea levels from global warming.

That is the argumentative frame of Black Earth Rising, and many of its images at least indirectly support its thesis, but the editor is on firmer (and maybe richer) ground with the three-part structure that he gives the book, a structure that I will follow here.  First is “Reckoning,” subtitled “legacies of slavery and colonialism.”  This section has numerous archival images, either reworked or appropriated for collages such as the following by Deborah Jack:

Atop the black and white image of, presumably, slaves in some extractive labor is the color image of organic produce.  Throughout the book, there is a contrast between the artists showing people and the artists presenting only nature, suggesting, perhaps, that the memory of racist colonialism never goes away no matter how much contemporary culture might learn from Black farming.

The next section is titled “Reimagining,” subtitled “new myths of survival and resistance.”  My illustrative image is by Todd Gray and is again a collage, this time of multiple periods of history and forms of representation:

If I read this aright, there are four layers blocking nature.  In this work, only the birds are free of colonial powers—church and state.  One layer has live humans, perhaps resisting the colonials.  The top layer has only fragments of humans trapped within the frames of dominant culture.

The third section of Black Earth Rising is “Reclaiming,” with “nature as a source of renewal and liberation.”  This section has the most imaginative and often abstract work, represented by the following painting by Alex Brionne:

The painting has conventional images of liberation—flight and the sea—but the man is turned toward the flowers growing over a gate, perhaps a reminder of the gates of hell Africans passed through as they were loaded into slave ships.  The man seems poised, in no hurry, perhaps because he belongs to the earth from which flowers rise above him.

Reviewers are allowed to reproduce only a few images in a review.  I’ve tried to select from the publisher’s short list works that have an element of somewhat conventional artistic sophistication.  The actual variety of images is as surprising as the book’s seemingly odd title.  The images range from the most basic documentary photographs to swirls of abstract expressionist painting, from series of small images to one work filling the page, from black and white or sepia to brazen color.  I know better than to say some are “exotic,” but I do believe viewers familiar with the folk products and symbols of Black culture will have the most immediate appreciation of the images in the book.

Some of the artists represented, such as Kara Walker and Daywood Bey, are established figures.  Many of the other artists are less known but no less inventive.  They are also from various countries.  Black Earth Rising suggests it takes much more than a village to stage an uprising.  Even a quiet revolution needs its scribes, but once the viewer is immersed in the works, the language of those scribes fades away, black and white marks in a world of color.

Since I’m partial to photography, I’ll use some of my remaining space for the following two, the first by the widely exhibited Carrie Weems, the second by Zig Jackson:

 In both these shots, the colonial and post-colonial world of buildings is partly framed by nature.  In the first, the woman gazes at the columned past.  She is not laboring in the field separating her from the big house.  In the second, the Native American has turned his back on the present and looks out over the past of nature—which could be a future if Black Earth Rising had its way, its hope.  Probably photoshopped with the artist’s name, the image has wit not much present in the book as a whole.

When a government refuses to believe in global warming and pursues energy policies that will hasten climate change, citizens need scholars and artists like those in Black Earth Rising to insist on the facts and, maybe even more importantly, elicit from readers and viewers emotional responses, those spurs to action, to rise up from the coffee table and lend support to the uprising.

A literary critic and novelist, Tom LeClair reviews photobooks for Open Letters Review.