LEARN A RIVER'S NAME
January - April, 2018
Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia, PA
Featured artists: Camp Little Hope (Walker Tuefts, Aislinn Pentecost-Farren), Matthew Friday, Dylan Gauthier, Ana Berta Hernandez, Mare Liberum, Sandy Sorlien, Danielle, Toronyi
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“Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer
What’s in a name? It’s one of the first things we ask someone when we meet them, yet often quickly forgotten. It’s often something given to us by others, yet expected to serve as a distillation of our identity. Who gets to decide a name is often a question layered with power dynamics, whether it be a people, places, organisms, ecosystems.
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Yet, despite these complexities, in a 2017 New York Times op-ed, from which the title of this show is taken, Akiko Busch writes, “Giving something a name is the first step in taking care of it.” Thinking of bodies of water, a name is an opening, a prelude, a microcosm, a way to be known – a first step on the pathway to meaningful connections between people and nature. This exhibition is guided by this question: how can art help us to know a river’s name, to not only value it but know it, and therefore to seek to steward it? With a focus on waterbodies in the Mid-Atlantic region, seven artists explore rivers and streams that are neighbors to the Schuylkill Center — the Schuylkill, Delaware, Brandywine, and Hudson Rivers.
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Learn a River’s Name consists of artworks and art investigations that provide inroads to getting to know our rivers. It includes projects that incorporated deep and focused engagement with a particular river, watershed, or stream. Featured alongside final products are relics from artistic processes by which an artist got to know a river in ways that might feel a lot like how we might get to know a person. Learn a River’s Name also includes art works that reveal something unseen about a water body’s characteristics, its essential nature.
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Wendell Berry wrote, “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.” Learn a River’s Name is an invitation to us to better know a river near us, a call to action to know not just its name, but its features, its needs, and how we can be a good neighbor to it.
