Could Baltimore unearth the Jones Falls? An art project imagines it in 2076.

For generations, planners and dreamers have imagined a stream rushing through the heart of Baltimore where a highway now divides it. One utopian vision, popular in corners of the Baltimore internet, pictures the “Jones Falls Riviera,” a Venetian-esque canal complete with arched bridges, boats and a waterfront promenade.

To some, this image might as well be cribbed from fantasy.

But a new art project, called Jones Falls 2076, dares to dream. Its curators challenge residents to set aside traffic reports and feasibility studies to picture the Jones Falls 50 years in the future. Does it have a highway on top? How about gondolas?

Each day, tens of thousands of drivers commute into Baltimore along Interstate 83, also known as the Jones Falls Expressway for the stream it covers. Baltimore leaders buried the Jones Falls from Station North to downtown more than a century ago and, about 50 years later, topped it with a highway.

Today, the city’s workforce relies on an armada of exurbanites, some of whom commute on the expressway from as far north as York County, Pennsylvania.

“I can get really bogged down in those kinds of details,” said Bruce Willen, an artist and member of the Ecological Design Collective behind the project. “That’s not really what this project is about.”

This month, Jones Falls 2076 opened its first exhibition, “Confluence,” at Greenmount West’s Area 405 gallery with mostly preexisting works by local artists and students. The exhibition runs until June 12 and kicks off a series of Jones Falls 2076 events.

Each piece shares a commitment to “imagining the present and the future of the river in radically different terms,” said Anand Pandian, a Johns Hopkins University anthropologist who has helped to lead the project.

A Wyman Park resident of almost two decades, Pandian said Jones Falls 2076 doesn’t necessarily prescribe ripping out I-83. The point is to elicit ideas from Baltimore residents about the future of their watershed.

Few of those ideas, however, seem to include a highway.

A corner of the exhibition displays crowdsourced material from a series of “River Reimagining” workshops the collective hosted this spring. Attendees received worksheets to sketch their own, often science fiction-inspired visions and draft faux newspaper headlines from the future: “Mayor unveils exhibit at BMA honoring 40 years of a daylit Jones Falls”; “Remembering North Avenue: Preserved ruins showcase Baltimore’s history in the center of the Jones Falls River”; “Aquatic council passes first water visa.”

The collective will stage a bigger exhibition in October at The Peale, where it plans to host panels and stage commissioned pieces on the past and future of the falls.

Alongside Willen and Pandian, Jones Falls 2076 is helmed by Lee Davis, co-founder of the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Center for Creative Impact. Johns Hopkins, MICA and Morgan State University have helped fund the project, along with grants from the T. Rowe Price Foundation and Chesapeake Bay Trust, whose grant comes from a 2024 settlement over an old vinegar plant’s pollution of the Jones Falls.

In Baltimore’s early history, the Jones Falls ran freely from the county, through the city center and into the harbor. A thriving mill industry developed along its banks that made it a center of labor and hazardous pollution. Things got so bad that former Mayor James Preston, who led Baltimore in the early 20th century, called the falls “a foul, open sewer” and a menace to health.

City leaders decided to bury the stream in 1915 and doubled down in the 1960s with the construction of the elevated I-83, which carries traffic through 10 miles of city before emptying onto a busy intersection two blocks from City Hall.

Today, the daylighting movement extends beyond the purview of artists and anthropologists.

Among the people at a recent “River Reimagining” workshop was former U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin. A Baltimore native, Cardin delivered an impassioned speech on the progress of Maryland waterways since he was a young legislator a half-century ago. He left attendees with a bold prediction.

“Fifty years from now,” Cardin said, “we’ll be looking at the Jones Falls as a waterway rather than as a road.”

Three City Council members attended, along with Thibault Manekin, the developer behind efforts to turn an industrialized stretch of the Jones Falls valley into a linear park.

Visitors to the spring exhibition will find Chesapeake Bay-inspired installations, a Morgan State project on daylighting the Jones Falls and sculptures made from stream detritus — all set to a soundtrack composed using water quality data from the National Aquarium’s Inner Harbor floating wetland.

For Willen, whose past works of public art include the “Ghost Rivers” installation tracing underground tributaries across North Baltimore, this project comes at a moment of renewed ambition.

Cities across the country have begun to reckon with the racist legacies of 1970s-era highway projects.

In Baltimore, a recent fight over the city’s attempt to move a dump into the Jones Falls floodplain sparked an impassioned defense of the valley and spurred Manekin to pursue his park project along an exposed stretch of the stream.

“All of a sudden, it’s like: Boom! Everything’s happening,” said Taylor Deese, a Towson University environmental planning student who joined Jones Falls 2076 organizers for a walking tour of the area last week. Stops included the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, which could see its own rejuvenation near Manekin’s proposed park, and Fallsway Fountain, a 1915 memorial to the stream’s entombment.

To Deese, the art project gives her license to dream.

“I didn’t know I could do that without getting fined,” she said. “People feel like they can’t envision a nice future.”

There was a time when burying the Jones Falls was seen as ambitious and even progressive, Pandian said. But at some point, maybe soon, city leaders could face a new calculation. They’ll have to decide between sinking hundreds of millions into maintenance of a declining expressway or planning something different.

Before making that choice, Pandian said, it’s important to ask, “What would we like that future to look like?”