Jones Falls 2076
On View October 15 – November 22, 2026
3rd Floor Galleries
The Jones Falls 2076 exhibition at The Peale explores alternative futures for Baltimore’s Jones Falls River, as imagined by artists, designers, writers, and community members.
Baltimore’s founding river has been hidden below I-83 for over 50 years, overlooked and mistreated. This waterway made possible the rise of Baltimore as an American industrial powerhouse. And yet it is out of sight and out of mind for many residents of the city and region. As the elevated expressway covering the Jones Falls nears the projected end of its lifespan, more and more Baltimoreans are imagining and asking for a different future for the river.
Jones Falls 2076 centers on 14 newly-commissioned speculative works that envision a radically restored and reimagined Jones Falls in the year 2076. These works reframe the Jones Falls to come half a century from now through the lens of possibility, imagining what it might look like unburied, reconnected, repaired, and recentered as the ecological, social, and civic heart of Baltimore.
Supplementing these works is a survey of previous plans, visions, and depictions of the Jones Falls from the 1800s through the present, from designs to tame, bury, and divert the river, through more recent proposals to daylight and reclaim the waterway.
Jones Falls 2076 is the second of two exhibitions presented by the Jones Falls 2076 project, following Confluence at AREA 405 this spring, and represents a culmination of the project’s year of activities. Building on Jones Falls 2076’s widely-attended River Reimagining Workshops, the new exhibition also features new participatory design opportunities that invite visitors to share their own visions.
Jones Falls 2076 poses these questions: What futures do we want for the river at the heart of our city? And how might we get there?
Featuring New Works by:
- Katryna Carter
- Alyssa Dennis
- Kondwani Fidel
- Curry J. Hackett
- Eric Johnson
- Andrew Paul Keiper + Julie Shapiro
- Mahan Rykiel Associates
- Ashley Minner Jones
- Xena Ni
- Hugh Pocock
- Lia Purpura
- Unknown Studio
- Nicholas Wisniewski + Merrell Hambleton
- Ziger|Snead Architects
The exhibition also includes a series of prompts and spaces for visitor participants to respond and to contribute their own unexpected and dream-like visions for the future of the Jones Falls.
Exhibition Events
Opening Reception: October 15, 2026, 5-7 PM | RSVP
Two Panel Discussions:
- Stories of Rivers Reclaimed: Panelists discuss case studies of other cities that successfully decommissioned highways and restored buried waterways.
- Future Directions for the Jones Falls: Civic leaders and planners discuss the steps that might be needed to effect highway removal and river restoration in Baltimore.
Artist Rountables featuring artist reflections and readings from Kondwani Fidel, Ashley Minner Jones, and Lia Purpura.
Community Design Charette: Baltimore community members share and collaborate on design concepts for a restored Jones Falls.
Designing with/for Nonhuman Species: Designers, ecologists, and environmentalists explore how we might imagine a more multi-species future for the Jones Falls.
The Team
Jones Falls 2076 is curated by Bruce Willen with Anand Pandian and Lee Davis. Additional exhibition support, design, and production provided by The Peale, Julianne Chan, Chelsea Foster, and Nic Amsel.
The larger Jones Falls 2076 project is co-organized by author, designer, and social entrepreneur Lee Davis (co-Executive Director of the Center for Creative Impact at MICA), anthropologist and author Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins University, co-founder of the Ecological Design Collective), and artist/designer/musician Bruce Willen (creator of the Ghost Rivers public art project, founder of Public Mechanics studio).
Jones Falls 2076 is a project of the Ecological Design Collective, a fiscally sponsored project of Inquiring Systems Inc, 501c(3).
The project is sponsored in part by Chesapeake Bay Trust, T. Rowe Price Foundation, Johns Hopkins University, Morgan State University School of Architecture + Planning, and MICA’s Center for Creative Impact.
