“Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa” opened at Bowdoin College Museum of Art in October. It continues through March 6, 2016. The first major pan-African art exhibition in Maine, “Earth Matters” also represents the first major exhibition to explore how African artists have used their work over the course of two centuries to mediate their relationship with the land upon which they live, work and frame their days.

Organized by Karen E. Milbourne, curator at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, the exhibition brings together approximately 50 exceptional works of art, created by artists from 17 African nations, from the turn of the 19th century, when the international slave trade became illegal, to the present.

The show uses five thematic sections to demonstrate the different ways in which the earth is interpreted through art: The Material Earth, Power of the Earth, Imagining the Underground, Strategies of the Surface, and Art as Environmental Action. These categories provide vantage points from which to examine the poignant relationships expressed by African artists to the land, whether it be to earth as sacred, medicinal, discoverable, or vulnerable.

The exhibition brings together two centuries of art inspired by both the physical and cultural African landscape. It includes pieces by internationally recognized and emerging contemporary artists from the continent and diaspora who draw on the land for inspiration, such as Sammy Baloji, Christine Dixie, Hassan Echair, Ingrid Mwangi, William Kentridge, George Osodi, Georgia Pappageorge, Jo Ratcliffe, Berni Searle and Tchif.

Historic works comprise a broad range of sculptural and two-dimensional objects that include reliquary guardian figures from Gabon, healing figures from the Republic of the Congo, vessels from Cameroon; masks and personal items from central and western Africa, and religious and political staffs from across Africa.

“We, each of us, make choices everyday that relate to the land beneath our feet,” said Milbourne. “Where we come from informs who we consider ourselves to be. What we throw out affects what this land of ours will be in the future.

“These issues are not African; they are global, but looking through the lens of Africa we can all better understand the human relationship to the landscape and its significance to the history of African art.”

After opening in 2013 to great acclaim at the National Museum of African Art Museum in Washington, DC, the show traveled to UCLA’s Fowler Museum in Los Angeles.

With immigrants from several African nations now settling in Mid-Coast Maine, this exhibition has special significance for the region. Above all, the exhibition demonstrates how art can frame critical, and ancient, human questions concerning our own relationship to the world around us politically, historically, and aesthetically.

Bowdoin College Museum of Art is located at 9400 College Street in Brunswick. For more information, call 207-725-3275.