Human/Nature: Envisioning the Environment

What does it mean to imagine the environment in today’s era?

To speak of “nature” or “climate” today is to engage with a tangle of memory, myth, data, and urgencies. It is to confront an inheritance that belongs to us all, individually and collectively, one that is shaped as equally by wonder and awe and beauty as it has been by trajectories of extraction and extinction and crisis.

Human/Nature: Envisioning the Environment brings together seven artists whose works explore these complications, asking how we might reimagine our relationship with the living world, and with each other, in a time of both ecological uncertainty and fractured realities. Environmental art does not simply depict landscapes or sound alarms: It intervenes in how we understand our place in the world, our relationship to one another, our vision for the future. It asks the central question of the humanities—What does the environment mean? What does the climate crisis mean?—and requires us to navigate these deep rifts and complex entanglements in the hope of finding common ground and decisive action.

Through installation, painting, photography, and other mediums, the artists in Human/Nature: Envisioning the Environment open up space for us to examine, to reflect, to change our minds. These artists’ work in that space of entanglement—between care and consumption, awe and anxiety, despair and hope—show us that “the environment” is not some distant landscape or opaque backdrop for our lived experience, but the very medium in which the human and nonhuman lives unfold.

Climate change, extinction, pollution, and the circulation of capital and commodities have made it impossible to maintain the illusion that human activity stands outside of the natural world. But in this truth there also lies hope—a key takeaway from this exhibition—for a more holistic relationship between humans and the natural world, a reminder that change is not impossible, that a better future for all life on earth can happen, if the will is there.

Douglas Tewksbury, Ph.D.
Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Niagara University
Guest Curator

Participating artists:

Chantal Calato Niagara Falls, New York

Jeri Coppola, New York, New York

Simon Frank, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Beili Liu, Austin, Texas

Alison Shields, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Eszter Sziksz, Sarasota, Florida

Dana Murray Tyrrell, Niagara Falls, New York

Opening Reception: April 9, 2026 | 4:30–7 p.m.

Niagara University Theatre Partnership

In conjunction with the exhibition Human/Nature: Envisioning the Environment, Niagara University Theatre’s 2025–2026 season will feature two productions that explore themes of environmental change. For more information and show times and to purchase tickets, please visit theatre.niagara.edu.

Cover Artwork: Alison Shields, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, (detail) Arctic Algae 3, 2025, oil on canvas