Being and Believing in the Natural World

Highlighting different perspectives across cultures and time, these works consider complex and evolving relationships with and beliefs about nature. In more than 100 objects drawn from the RISD Museum’s Asian, Native American, and ancient Mediterranean collections, makers from 2000 BCE to the present day explore human relationships with the natural world. Their responses span a wide range of media and processes to express awe and reverence for nature’s abundance, beauty, and powers of destruction; to intercede with the divine; and to document the willful extraction of resources.

Curated by Gina Borromeo, curator of ancient art; Sháńdíín Brown, Henry Luce Curatorial Fellow for Native American Art; and Wai Yee Chiong, associate curator of Asian art.

RISD Museum is supported by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and with the generous partnership of the Rhode Island School of Design, its Board of Trustees, and Museum Governors.