This building was once a pool. In the basement of the Zimmerli, you will find a room tiled beautifully wall to wall to floor, and as you walk further into the archives of old catalogs and castaway pedestals, you reach four feet and can no longer stand straight. So it must be appropriate for the museum to dedicate a three-month-long special exhibition to it's old friend, Water. This is no ordinary Zimmerli Collections show of ordinary 20th century American prints or soviet non-conformist findings! Dr. Donna Gustafson has put together a provocative yet pleasing exhibition for those more conservative crowd of seasoned museumgoers.
We descend the staircase and notice a large fishing net filled with green plastic water bottles. Cisneros’ water is harvested from a melting glacier in Greenland. It is a cause for alarm and hangs heavily over our heads. Through the front doors we get acquainted with ‘Water in Nature’, as it is continually evolving in different forms.
When I began working at the Zimmerli I refilled buckets and buckets of the Water stuff to mop up years of dust and debris caked onto cracked linoleum tiles. This August I spent three days meticulously dremmeling and tapping steel pins into the wall for Maya Lin's Pin River-Hudson 2009. I assumed the role that water takes in modifying the landscape, metaphorically. Pin River filled its role as 'Water in the Landscape', the second section of the exhibition organized by Dr. Donna Gustafson. She curated the exhibition with the affiliated Rutgers University in mind as an informative exhibition. By providing different views of the same landmark, the Hudson river by Albert Bierstadt next to Maya Lin’s post-minimalist version, Gustafson recontextualizes the historical works, allowing us to see them in new light. All works on view are arranged not according to date but to subject, and that is what’s important. Changes in wall color also allow movement throughout the space, drawing us into each new room.
We see ‘Women in the waves and Men in Boats’, lightly touching upon water’s effect of parting genders. We quickly move back into the essence of water itself, learning of water as a spiritual and emotional force. By the second half of the exhibition we are completely soothed. And in the end, with pollution and images of lack of water, Gustafson reminds us that Water should not be poured down the drain, giving it a prime spot at the pool turned museum.
Other images to be included:works on paper by
-NANCY GRAVES
- EMMA AMOS
I chose these five pieces because of their fluidity. They are straight-forward in depicting water as the subject. Representing both the water-scape as well as human interaction both immediately with the physical form of water as well as indirectly in re-creating the representation of water.
