The Future of Here: A Glimpse of a River Culture to Come 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?

Artists and exhibition curators are thrilled to lead, Tunes from Trash, Making Music from What We Leave Behind: Crafting instruments and thinking about music with Jordan Tierney and the International Arts & Mind Lab. Participants will consider the many natural and human-made sounds reverberating across the Jones Falls watershed. What does it sound like? How can we listen better in order to understand our environment better? How might we translate what we are hearing to engage our community? Using materials found in stream beds and river banks, participants will play with sound, motion, and material to build a sound vocabulary based on the unique flotsam and jetsam of this place.

We will provide a collection of found objects in the workshop, but we also encourage you to bring any found objects you would like to share or include from your wanderings.

***Weather permitting, we will join in a procession with our newly made music/noise devices, welcoming Spring and honoring the incredible life of Kim Domanski in our thoughts as we descend the stairs, exit the front door of the museum, go round the corner to where the Jones Falls comes out of its dark subterranean tunnel flowing out to the harbor, the Chesapeake Bay, and further horizons…

Jordan Tierney is a visual artist based in Baltimore. As a Symbiocene Epoch Shaman, she acts as a catalyst for deep kinship with our planet. She shares her artwork to inspire other human earthlings to slow down and reconnect with themselves, each other and the living breathing planet that is our home. Her most recent work grows from over a decade of inhabiting and studying Baltimore’s urban streams and tangled forest buffers. She pulls refuse from the streams and woods, removes invasive plants and vines, and tries to live sustainably. To manage the distress over what we have lost, she uses her skills and a little sorcery to change the valence of the trash she collects from negative to positive, imagining a more soulful future for us all. She received her BFA from MICA. In addition to teaching immersive outdoor workshops, her work has been featured in galleries across the DMV and she has fabricated exhibits for the Smithsonian, the BMA and AVAM.