Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 explores the extent to which certain resources—air, land, water, and even culture—can be held in common. Raising questions about inclusion, exclusion, ownership, and rights of access, the exhibition considers art’s vital role in society alongside its calls for vigilance in defending shared resources. Presented on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, Toward Common Cause deploys the Fellows Program as an “intellectual commons” and features new and recontextualized work by twenty-nine visual artists who have been named Fellows since the award program’s founding in 1981.