Boreal forests are having a moment in museums. ‘Northern Lights’, which opened at the Fondation Beyeler in January and travels to the Buffalo AKG in August, featured dozens of Canadian and Nordic landscape paintings by artists including Edvard Munch, Lawren Harris and Akseli Gallen-Kallela that depict forests just north and south of the Arctic circle. An exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum is taking more of a documentary approach, educating visitors about the wonders of snowy woodland through photographs, videos, objects and first-person stories (26 July–27 September 2026). The biodiversity of this chilly biome is remarkable: it’s home to 85 species of animal and two billion migratory birds as well as 3.7m humans. More immediately striking than the facts and figures are the images: wolves that size you up with amber eyes, fields of vetch sprouting from glacial moraines and herds of caribou trudging through the foothills of icy mountains.
Find out more from the Peabody Essex Museum’s website.
Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary
