The 2025 KMAC Triennial, where the rivers run muddy and the mountains are bare, explores artist’s relationship with the natural world and the ways in which we navigate our changing planet amid climate crises and an augmented physical connection to our environment. The exhibition questions how the ever-widening gulf between the real and the virtual can be mediated through artistic practice. Furthermore, the exhibition underscores Kentucky’s striking landscape and identity in the wake of political conflict, resource extraction, and extraordinary weather events.

Referencing Sturgill Simpson’s 2013 song “Old King Coal,” where the rivers run muddy and the mountains are bare highlights Kentucky’s history and landscape. Emphasizing work by artists who live and work in the commonwealth, the exhibition includes themes of sustainability, identity, climate grief, our detached relationship with nature, and appreciation for our environment using a wide range of mediums. Incorporating painting, photography, sculpture, and ceramics, the exhibition features natural, artificial, recycled, foraged, and repurposed materials.

It is without a doubt that the land we live on informs who we are, and that is especially true of Kentucky. In the years between the 2022 and the 2025 Triennial, the commonwealth has weathered multiple unprecedented natural disasters, the severity and frequencies of which become ever amplified due to the warming of our planet caused by our dependency on fossil fuels. We have become more aware of the preciousness of our small part of the world, and more resilient while heading into the future.