Professor Beatriz Cortez is featured in the new group show “Seeds: Containers of a World to Come” at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis. The exhibition brings together ten contemporary artists whose research-based practices are defined by sustained inquiry into plant–human–land relations. The artists work with and come from a diversity of geographical and cultural contexts—Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and Western Europe—and employ a variety of media–sculptures, films, installations, and paintings. They all share an anticolonial perspective critical of extractive capitalism.

For Cortez and artists Shiraz Bayjoo, Carolina Caycedo, Juan William Chávez, Ellie Irons, Kapwani Kiwanga, Jumana Manna, Anne Percoco, Cecilia Vicuña, and Emmi Whitehorse, the seed is the kernel, literally and metaphorically, of their investigations into issues of fragility, preservation, and possibility in the face of the global climate crisis. The exhibition aims to spark active and imaginative responses through encounters with visually arresting artworks that reflect on and reframe our understanding of current environmental challenges and our connection to the natural world.

“Seeds: Containers of a World to Come” is on view from February 21–July 28, 2025.