Worcester Art Museum Presents “Fever Dreams of a Cool-Breathed Earth,” an Exhibition of New Artworks Exploring Impacts of Climate Change on the Human Experience

Worcester, MA—March 18, 2026—This spring, the Worcester Art Museum (WAM) will present Fever Dreams of a Cool-Breathed Earth, a new multimedia exhibition featuring works by Christa Donner and Andrew S. Yang. The artists’ largest collaboration to date, Fever Dreams of a Cool-Breathed Earth is an immersive, site-specific experience, combining kinetic and interactive sculptures, collages, drawings, videos, and sound to invite viewers to consider the impacts of climate change on our lives today. The exhibition will be on view March 28–August 16, 2026, in Gallery 2201.

“Donner and Yang move fluidly between art, science, and community engagement in ways that feel especially meaningful in this moment,” said Samantha Cataldo, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Worcester Art Museum and curator of the exhibition. “We were thrilled that they proposed a project that was universal in its themes yet informed by dialogues with Worcester’s community. Their explorations of climate experience bring a multitude of vital perspectives and demonstrate how contemporary art can help us understand the world around us.”

Large-scale works punctuate the exhibition and inspire awe for visitors of all ages. The exhibition begins with an artwork that visitors enter through: Breezeway (2026), an immersive artwork that uses projected video, environmental sound, and fans to simulate atmospheric sensations. Once inside the gallery, visitors find artworks that engage sight, sound, and touch, inviting them to imagine possible futures for humanity and the environment. Hanging from the ceiling, Yang’s Earthly Equipoise (2025) is a large spherical mobile composed of various imagery including clouds, airplanes, birds, and trees. Donner’s Future Forest (2025) is a wall drawing approximately 20 feet wide and 10 feet tall, depicting one of Worcester’s green spaces cultivated through the city’s Miyawaki Forests and CoolPockets project, which plants fast-growing, small-scale native forests in urban spaces to strengthen a community’s climate resilience.

Donner and Yang have approached the ongoing threat of climate change in conversation with communities regional to the Worcester Art Museum. Their work is informed by the perspectives of Massachusetts-based climatologists, environmental stewards, and local residents. “Expanded green spaces reduce the dangers of extreme heat in cities, made worse by global warming,” say Donner and Yang. Several sound-based and video works emphasize our personal relationships to the larger climate through everyday experiences of the weather. The artists met with Worcester residents to talk about the weather and compiled it into an audio collage titled Let’s Talk About the Weather (Voices of Worcester) (2025) as well as the titular digital video, Fever Dreams of a Cool-Breathed Earth (2026). In For the Catalogue of Endangered Sounds (2026), Donner and Yang collaborated with Massachusetts-based naturalist John Green and their young daughter to create a sound installation that includes a selection of terms like “global warming” and “safe drinking water” that have been effectively banned from national grant applications under the current presidential administration. Spoken words are interspersed with bird calls by Green that highlight local species.

The exhibition will also be an opportunity to discover both artists’ individual practices. Donner is fascinated with parallels between the human body and the geological planetary body, which can be seen particularly in Undercurrent (2026) and Boundary Layers (2025), drawings in which Donner creates images that relate earth with flesh, rocks with teeth, and waterways with arteries. Similarly, Yang is known for using collage to visually connect the human and non-human in ways that reconsider the relationship between the two. In Unnatural Disasters I (2014)—which appears in a series of four collages in the exhibition—he explores imagery related to natural disasters, pairing photographs of flexing muscles with images of destroyed homes. Yang’s Earth Stories (2026), a mixed media assemblage, visualizes the interwoven systems of creatures and the planet through their many shared forms.

Fever Dreams of a Cool-Breathed Earth is one of two exhibitions at the Worcester Art Museum this spring that explore humanity’s evolving experiences with weather and climate. A Weather Eye: Art and Early Modern Meteorology (March 28–June 28, 2026) showcases more than 40 artworks—primarily works on paper from the Museum’s collection—to consider the dramatic scientific and social shift in Europe and America’s collective understanding of weather from the 16th to early 19th century, with a particular focus on advances in meteorology. Accompanying the two exhibitions is a catalog titled Facing the Elements: Visualizing Weather Then, Climate Now, containing visual responses from Donner and Yang to the works in A Weather Eye alongside preparatory sketches for their own work. Published by Hirmer, the catalog includes interviews by Donner and Yang with renowned climatologist Raymond S. Bradley and Michele Wick, a psychologist who focuses on responses to climate change. Author and print specialist Rebecca Szantyr (New York Public Library) contributes an essay on weather and humor, and Cataldo and Stone introduce the themes of both exhibitions. 

“Our strong collection of early modern prints provides a compelling launching point for Donner and Yang’s work. Their backgrounds in both academic research and art on climate change will contribute to an exhibition that has both global implications and roots in the Museum’s local community,” says Claire Whitner, the Museum’s Director of Curatorial Affairs and the James A. Welu Curator of European Art. “By aligning our contemporary projects with the presentation of our historic collection, we underscore its enduring relevance to our visitors.” 

“Connecting the local and the global as well as past, present, and future is one of the things the Worcester Art Museum is able to do best, thanks to the depth of our collection and the creativity of our team,” said Matthias Waschek, Jean and Myles McDonough Director of the Worcester Art Museum. “Together, these exhibitions invite us to consider weather and climate not only as scientific phenomena, but as forces that have shaped human understanding and daily life across centuries. We are thrilled to serve as a platform for these artists to contribute to this timely conversation.”

The Museum will host a number of public programs and events related to the two exhibitions. On Friday, March 27, from 6 to 8 pm, visitors are invited to After Hours: Party Up a Storm to celebrate the opening of the exhibitions with the artists and curators, with music, drinks, and more. On Sunday, March 29, storm chaser and filmmaker “Pecos Hank” Schyma will present a talk connecting art with science, with stories from his work creating nature documentaries and educational science videos that have reached an audience of millions. And on Sunday, May 17, Donner and Yang will present an artist talk delving into the concepts and creative process behind their work. Tickets are available at worcesterart.org/events and are free for Worcester Art Museum Members.

About the Artists

Donner is an artist, writer, and organizer who investigates the human/animal body and its metaphors. Her practice combines material exploration and social exchange to propose speculative models that move between the emotional architecture of our own bodies and the layered histories of the world we inhabit. Donner’s work is exhibited widely, including projects for venues including the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapore), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, Germany), BankArt NYK (Yokohama, Japan), Chiaki Kamikawa Contemporary Art (Paphos, Cyprus), the Museum Bellerive (Zurich, Switzerland), the Centro Columbo Americano (Medellin, Colombia), and throughout the United States. Donner’s practice extends to her role as a curator and educator.  She has taught across nine colleges, including fifteen years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and currently teaches courses in creative research, drawing, and multisensory making through the Five College Consortium in Western Massachusetts.

Yang works across the visual arts, natural sciences, and the flux of expanded research. His projects have been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Spencer Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, with curatorial projects Earthly Observatory at SAIC Galleries and Making Kin – Worlds Becoming for the Center for Humans and Nature. His essays appear in Leonardo, Biological Theory, Art Journal, and recently in the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies as well as the series Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Yang is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For more information, please contact:

Images (left to right):

Andrew S. Yang with Christa Donner, Puzzle, 2025, sculpted wooden sphere, stain, paint, 17.75 × 17.75 cm (7 × 7 in.). Photo: Julia Featheringill.

Christa Donner and Andrew S. Yang, touch globe prototype, 2025, thermochromic paint and pigmented ink on wood, 17.75 × 17.75 cm (7 × 7 in.). Photo: Julia Featheringill.