Rimer Cardillo. Deep Ecology: Layered Vestiges

November 6, 2025 – February 28, 2026     

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 6, 2025 | 4:30 – 6 pm

Few artists today embody the urgent call of environmentalism as powerfully as Rimer Cardillo. The Uruguayan-American artist has spent over fifty years building a body of work that mourns, warns, and ultimately inspires. His art connects directly to the idea of Deep Ecology, a philosophy that insists we can no longer separate human survival from the survival of all living things. For Cardillo, this is no abstract theory. His work traces a lineage from the genocide of Indigenous peoples to the extinction of plants and animals, as well as the destruction of the earth’s ecosystems. It is a continuum of loss, but also a call to recognize that all life is interconnected. Since his student days in Uruguay during the late 1960s, Cardillo has used his art to memorialize what has vanished and warn of what could still disappear. The result is a haunting, beautiful, and deeply ethical visual language. The works on view at the North Dakota Museum of Art include multi-media sculptures, photographic installation, and selected sketchbooks highlighting the artists observational skills.

Cardillo studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Montevideo, the Berlin Weibensee School of Art, and the Leipzig School of Graphic Arts. He has lived in the US since 1979 and taught printmaking at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Cardillo was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997, represented Uruguay at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and has exhibited extensively throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. His work is held in many private and public collections around the world. 

In addition to the exhibition at NDMOA, this exhibition unfolds across five institutions in eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota, each offering a distinct lens on Cardillo’s career:

Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota
Sacred Natures
August 28, 20205 – February 8, 2026

Nemeth Art Center, Park Rapids, Minnesota
Indigenous Journeys
August 28 – September 30, 2025

Art Project 605, Detroit Lakes, Minnesota
Resistant Allusions
September 2-30, 2025

The Rourke Art Gallery + Museum, Moorhead Minnesota
Sublime Impressions
January 8 – February 8, 2026

Support for this multi-venue exhibition is provided by the Trout Lilly Foundation, New York. Support also provided by Judith Whitney Godwin Foundation for the Arts, New York, for the exhibition catalogue, available in January 2026.

Rimer Cardillo. Deep Ecology: Layered Vestiges (Essay)

Throughout the Americas and across the western hemisphere, the Uruguayan-American artist Rimer Cardillo is today one of the foremost proponents of environmental art. The subtitle for this exhibition clearly associates the related languages of deep ecology with the ideas of sacred nature. Both terms are fundamental to an understanding of the artist’s creative endeavor and innovative contributions that now extend over more than half a century. A deep ecology speaks to the relation between the ever-more-rapid extinction of plant and animal species and the genocide of Indigenous Peoples around the globe. The eradication of human difference is one and the same as the demise of Earth’s other living organisms and their habitats. Intimately linked to this increasing loss of genetic diversity is the destruction of the land, water, air and other natural resources that sustain life itself. The phrase deep ecology first appeared in a 1973 article by Norwegian eco-philosopher Arne Næss, and similar concerns have been central

to Cardillo’s art since his earliest years as a student of printmaking in his native Uruguay during the late 1960s. The relentless allusions to deaths and annihilations in Cardillo’s art not only memorializes past losses, but also foresees the greater catastrophes and devastations to come. Because human actions drive these processes at ever-increasing rates, they form a thread that consistently runs throughout the artist’s work as an imagemaker of forceful power, penetrating insight, and even prophetic meaning.

The development of deep ecology as a philosophical theory and political movement has emerged side-by-side with an ever-increasing commitment to the recovery of a sacred nature. Reverence for the interconnectedness of all things is often identified with the belief systems of First Peoples and frequently associated with the spiritual foundations of Native Societies. The philosophy is often expressed as a “resacralization” (or again finding the sacred) within both living biology and

inert material of the universe. To this end, Cardillo subtly employs traditional religious symbols and imagery in a re-envisioning of a sacred nature. For example, Cardillo’s artworks and installations make very direct references to precious reliquaries and ornate altarpieces, to holy icons and elaborate sanctuaries. References to established western religions such as Byzantine Christian Orthodoxy or Baroque Roman Catholicism often also appear, alluding to the barbaric

colonization of the Americas by European powers and horrific and violent confrontations between Old and New Worlds. It is best to say that Cardillo employs a vocabulary of various established religions to effectively symbolize a holiness, convincingly represent a blessedness, and successfully convey a spirituality.

The emergence of this dialogue between the ecological and the sacred points to pathways and destinations that embrace environmental protections and cultural preservations. In these ways, Cardillo’s art encompasses all of life: the creatures of lands, waters and skies, including human existence itself. In memorializing all that is lost, Rimer Cardillo’s art expresses a fuller sense, more embracing understanding and fundamental continuation of our world — and calls attention to the deep ecology of a sacred nature.

Rimer Cardillo. Photo: Leo Barizzoni