The Pulitzer Arts Foundation is planning an exhibition focused on medieval art and its relationship to the environment. Medieval Art and Ecology (working title) will run from March 10 through August 9, 2023. Bringing together approximately forty objects produced between 1100-1500 CE, the show will highlight the transformative impacts that art-making had on the environment, as well as medieval people's interactions with and attitudes toward their natural surroundings. As a period that experienced profound cultural transformation due in part to environmental crises like famine, plague, climate change, and deforestation, the Middle Ages stands as a particularly rich era for exploring this subject matter. While Medieval Art and Ecology builds off of decades of scholarship that interrogates how artists derived inspiration from plants, animals, and natural phenomena, the exhibition will be the first of its kind. It will engage emerging fields of study such as ecocritical art history, which seeks to position artworks within the particular ecological conditions that engendered their creation. By bringing together a broad range of materials including stone, metal, wood, ivory, cloth, and parchment, we will demonstrate how activities like quarrying, mining, forestry, and animal husbandry left both temporary and permanent marks on medieval landscapes. To do so, we will pair sculptures, paintings, and textiles with contemporaneous manuscript illuminations that depict laborers extracting raw materials from the earth and artists refining them into works of art. While the objects included in the exhibition were made in Europe, many of them incorporate substances sourced on other continents, demonstrating how the demand for particular art­making materials affected landscapes around the far-flung reaches of the medieval globe. The artworks will also illustrate how people negotiated their relationships to the environment at large, blending classical, medieval, and religious knowledge with lived experiences and personal observations. From iconographic inspiration derived from the natural world to the incorporation of materials whose symbolism is deeply linked to fire, water, sky, and earth, these objects reveal the sophisticated and nuanced approaches medieval artists and patrons took toward their surroundings. Ultimately, the exhibition will shed new light on the multilayered ways in which medieval art is linked to the environment, and will prompt new considerations of the long history of human modifications to the earth in the service of cultural production. Medieval Art and Ecology is organized by Curatorial Associate Heather Alexis Smith. In keeping with the exhibition's themes, Smith is making a conscious effort to reduce the carbon footprint of the show by securing loans from United States-based collections that are largely located in the Midwest and along the northeastern seaboard.