Immerse yourself in Fever Dreams of a Cool-Breathed Earth, a new exhibition created for the Worcester Art Museum by Christa Donner and Andrew S. Yang. Their first joint museum exhibition and largest collaboration to date, the multi-sensory experience situates the weather and the seasons in an examination of climate change in the twenty-first century. The artists propose that: “as warm-blooded creatures on an intensely warming Earth, we find ourselves seeking new ways to adapt our bodies to the planetary one—both have a fever in need of cooling. This exhibition reflects on climate-driven extreme heat and visualizes the deeply material and figurative relationship of our bodies to the changing planetary body as complex systems in transformation.”
Fever Dreams of a Cool-Breathed Earth is a multimedia exhibition featuring drawing, sculpture, sound, and video. The artists approach the ongoing threat of climate change in conversation with communities regional to the Worcester Art Museum; like many other American cities, Worcester faces issues of extreme urban heat exacerbated by global warming. The perspectives of Massachusetts-based climatologists, community gardeners, and local residents will inform the art Donner and Yang create. More information on art experiences and programming will be announced in 2026.
Continue the journey: Fever Dreams of a Cool-Breathed Earth is one of two exhibitions at the Worcester Art Museum that explore how our relationships with weather and climate have changed over time. Explore the dramatic scientific and social shift in Europe and America’s collective understanding of weather from the 16th to early 19th century in A Weather Eye: Art and Early Modern Meteorology, on view March 28–June 28, 2026.
A joint catalogue titled Facing the Elements: Visualizing Weather Then, Climate Now will be published by Hirmer Verlag in March 2026.
More about the artists
Christa Donner reimagines the body as a site for both conflict and cooperation. Her practice combines material exploration and social exchange to reimagine sensory ecologies. Donner’s work is exhibited widely, including projects for the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapore), the Museum Bellerive (Zurich), BankArt NYK (Yokohama), and throughout the United States. She has published numerous essays and reviews in the magazines Proximity, Dialogue, Punk Planet, and Friction, as well as interviews and writing for Cultural ReProducers, the artistic platform and website she founded in 2012 to engage the creative balancing acts of artists raising children. Donner earned her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago. She teaches drawing and creative research through the Five College Consortium in Western Massachusetts and previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University, among others.
Andrew S. Yang’s multimedia projects explore our ever-changing ecological entanglements. His work has been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Spencer Museum of Art, the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapore), and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History; his curatorial projects include Earthly Observatory at School of the Art Institute of Chicago AIC Galleries and Making Kin—Worlds Becoming for the Center for Humans and Nature. Yang’s transdisciplinary writing appears in publications including Leonardo, Biological Theory, Art Journal, the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies, as well as the series Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. He received an MFA in Visual Arts from the Lesley University College of Art and Design, and a PhD in ecology and evolution from Duke University. Yang teaches environmental studies and visual art and is a Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
This exhibition is generously supported by the Fletcher Foundation. It is also funded in part by the Ruth and John Adam, Jr. Exhibition Fund, Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund, Michie Family Curatorial Fund, John M. Nelson Fund, and Bernard G. and Louise B. Palitz Fund. Related exhibition programming is supported by the Schwartz Charitable Foundation and Spear Fund for Public Programs.
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