Before California: Laura Cunningham
The David Brower Center believes that art has unique transformative power, especially when placed in the service of activism. As art critic Lucy Lippard says, such art “cares about, challenges, involves, and consults the audience for whom it is made, respecting community and environment … and is engaged with...
Thinking Like A River: Art, Advocacy, and the Legacy of David Brower
Environmentalist, mountaineer and visionary David R. Brower changed the way our society thinks about natural places and, consequently, changed the world. In the year he would have been 100, we celebrate his legacy of activism with a special summer exhibition. The show features the exhibit format books pioneered by...
Land, Use: Works by Amy Franceschini and Fernando García-Dory
Amy Franceschini and Fernando Garcia-Dory share artistic interests and approaches. Using social practice methods such as direct engagement with communities, they explore themes related to humankind’s collaboration with the land. In particular, they are interested in how the development of contemporary cities has affected traditional land use such as...
One Cubic Foot: Miniature Surveys in Biodiversity, Photographs by David Liittschwager
How much life grows or passes, on land or sea, through one cubic foot of space? To find out, and to record the concentrates of biodiversity that occupy such a space, the photographer David Liittschwager and a group of scientists have been recording whatever appeared in an open green...
Hello Tomorrow: Bay Area Artists Envision the Future
The Brower Center asked Bay Area artists to respond to David Brower’s quote: “Have a good time saving the world. Otherwise, you’re just going to depress yourself.” With over 500 submissions, we were inspired by the sheer breadth of the work. From traditional painting to installation to the conceptual...
Methods and Materials: Ecological Art in Practice with Daniel McCormick
Daniel McCormick has practiced ecological art for 25 years, installing sculptural works in damaged natural environments to effect positive ecological change. His ephemeral artworks of organic materials are used as silt traps and erosion control weavings, and are intended to evolve and recede from view over time. In the...
Running the Numbers: Chris Jordan
In Chris Jordan’s series Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, begun in 2005, the artist represented the staggering statistics of American consumption. Two million bottles were depicted in a larger-than-human-scale digital photograph entitled Plastic Bottles, 2007, literally representing the number of plastic beverage bottles used in the United States...
Water, Rivers and People / Agua, Ríos y Pueblos: Images of the Global Effort to Defend Rivers and Human Rights
Presented in partnership with International Rivers and the Madera Group The result of an international collaboration, the David Brower Center’s current exhibition is an homage to those who fight to defend rivers and the people who depend on them. With striking imagery by celebrated photographers such as Robert Dawson, “Water, Rivers and...
The Lake Project: Photographs By David Maisel
In 2001, David Maisel photographed at Owens Lake, once a 200-square-mile lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in California. The resulting Lake Project offers stunning aerial images of a fertile valley transformed into an arid stretch of land. Beginning in 1913, the Owens River was...
Then and Now: Photographs by Sebastião Salgado
“Then and Now” was the inaugural exhibition in the Brower Center’s Hazel Wolf Gallery from May 2009 through January 2010. This exhibition presented a selection of images spanning a career in documentary photography by renowned Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. His images tell the story of an era, tracing the...