The Future of Here is an invitation to reimagine our place along the Jones Falls River and the Chesapeake Bay in a distant future beyond our fossil-fueled present. Consider what local landscapes and cultures might look like in a time far beyond the Baltimore we know now. What artifacts might people of that future time produce, and how might they make creative use of the many things we leave behind? The exhibition features work made by a collective of artists and researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 2024, anchored in a class co-taught by visual artist Jordan Tierney and environmental anthropologist Anand Pandian. We present artifacts and evidence from our collective journey into the future.

Each week last fall, we surrendered ourselves to the landscapes of our urban watershed, and our imaginations of what this place could one day become. We made our way through railway underpasses and neglected streambeds, turning our senses from the commotion of city streets to the vibrant yet unseen riverscape. Priming our brains with poetry and ethnobotany, historical maps and speculative fictions, we tuned into the rhythms of the city’s hidden environments and the creatures who live there. We recorded subtle sounds, patterns of light, pawprints and landmarks, studying how these places respire, blossom, and decay. We invented a new culture for the distant future and the roles its people might have, imagining how they might live with this environment and the relics of our own time. 

The Jones Falls was once so polluted by local industries that the city forced it into underground tunnels and culverts many decades ago. Remainders of that history and all the objects that people still leave behind – soda cans, rusty machine parts, plastic toys, broken glass – can be found everywhere along our streams. We went looking for such waste materials as unknown treasures, gathering them up as the foundation of our collective art studio. We imagined what these human things could one day become when our own civilization has faded away, crafting new objects and imagining the stories and significance they might carry one day. The Future of Here dreams of a more symbiotic and hopeful time to come for our watershed and planet. We hope that visitors will be inspired by our collective experiment, building their own stories and resources to face an uncertain future.