As forest fires and floods seem to proliferate, how do we feel global warming in our weather? That’s one of the questions animating Christa Donner and Andrew S. Yang’s exhibition “Fever Dreams of a Cool-Breathed Earth” at the Worcester Art Museum from March 28 to Aug. 16, 2026.
The married couple, who live in Sunderland, visualize “the physical and metaphorical relationships between our own bodies and our biodiverse planet. As global warming impacts the livability of Earth, Donner and Yang look to weather not simply as a passing, everyday phenomenon but as a sign of fundamental change,” according to the museum.
Here, human-caused global warming causes chaotic weather. Here, paintings, collages, videos, sculptures and books aim to get us to feel the heat by equating arteries with waterways, our own bodies with the earth. “Is the fevered body succumbing to the heat, or being healed by the cooling elements of trees, water, and wind?” one sign asks.
The phrase “cool-breathed earth” comes from 19th-century transcendentalist Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” as “he relates his own breath to that of the atmospheric air current, one of many connections between the personal and the planetary,” the museum explains. For Donner and Yang, the fever is “the dangerous overheating of the climate and of ourselves, while ‘dreams’ can be surreal imaginings, symbolic messages, or hopeful aspirations.”
“Rather than simply depicting the threat of climate change, or suggesting solutions to complex problems,” the museum writes, “the artists propose something more open-ended. They invite us to relate to the Earth as we would to a loved one who is ailing.”
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