Nature Sanctuary Tour

Nature Sanctuary explores relationships between the natural world and ideas of home. Spanning the Sculpture Park’s front lawn and beyond, this exhibition features original, site-inspired commissions and loans by a group of women artists.

Their artworks express refuge, care, and the shared protective relationship between humans and the natural world. Through their work, these artists consider past, present, and future ramifications of climate change, as well as land use and the migration of people, plants, and animals across homelands.

Their projects also reveal contradictions inherent to a “nature sanctuary” and expose how protecting the natural world has been used to justify the exclusion or displacement of living beings.

Nature Sanctuary is framed by deCordova’s former identity as a family home and its present-day integration within The Trustees. As Massachusetts’ largest, and the nation’s first, conservation and preservation nonprofit, The Trustees protects more than 120 special places, as well as countless plants and animals. This exhibition deepens awareness of deCordova’s “more than human” landscape and its unique ecological and geological features. To strengthen these intersections of art and place, environmental caretakers have written perspectives about each artwork and the surrounding landscape.