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It’s one thing to know that all sounds are vibrations, and it’s another thing entirely to see the physical manifestation of those frequencies. For Marielle V. Jakobsons, transforming waves from sound into water has come to shape her music as both a composer and performer. The David Brower Center and Other Minds present the Oakland multi-instrumentalist at 7…

Since 2009, National Geographic has not released an exhibition in the Bay Area, but with the talk around climate change becoming more prevalent, Paul Nicklen brings us his newest project, “Polar Obsession.” “Polar Obsession,” on display now at the David Brower Center, features more than 40 photographs of intimate wildlife encounters in the Arctic and…

To counter contemporary political discourses denying climate change, we need only turn our heads to the polar regions to understand the urgency of protecting these fragile yet beautiful ecosystems. Canadian-born Paul Nicklen is a photographer, marine biologist and conservationist. He knows that the Arctic region is warming up twice as fast as anywhere on the…

California has a reputation for endless natural bounty and wide economic possibility. But its epic recent drought has put pressure on this idea. Without water, the state’s huge agricultural sector is threatened, along with its swimming pool-centric lifestyle. The photographers Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris represent this changing reality in a new exhibition in Berkeley…

On Friday night at the David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley, Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris were awarded the center’s eighth annual Art/Act Award for their environmental activist work known as The Canary Project. At the Q&A that capped the evening, the Brooklyn-based husband and wife team sat in directors’ chairs and fielded questions from a…

For many, the National Park Service is the steward of the moss-draped Olympic Peninsula, the yawning Grand Canyon and Yellowstone’s skyscraping geysers. For Raven Chacon, the U.S. Park Service is that and also something more complicated. Chacon, a musician and artist, grew up in the Navajo Nation, a vast reservation in the Southwest that straddles…

Edward Morris was a private investigator in 2006 and his wife, Susannah Sayler, a fledgling art photographer when they read Elizabeth Kolbert’s potent three-part New Yorker series on global warming, “The Climate of Man.” That set them on their path. “She made the reader understand that climate change is happening now, not a problem for…

Art has played an influential role in the modern environmental movement, dating all the way back to Albert Bierstadt’s 19th century landscape paintings and Carleton Watkins’ photographs of Yosemite Valley that moved President Abraham Lincoln to protect the area as parkland. Then in the late 1930s, Berkeley native David Brower, the first executive director of…

The keen connection between artists and nature springs to dramatic expression in “Common Ground,” a juried exhibit honoring the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service May 20-Sept. 8 at the Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way. Displaying work by 20 Bay Area artists, the nation’s open spaces appear in dual tones: from microcosmic examinations made…

Cheryl Leonard followed a long winding path from the Berkeley Hills to the polar regions, but her ability to make arresting music using the sounds of melting glaciers flows directly from an epiphany she experienced hiking near Tilden. Leonard has spent a good deal of time over the past eight years in the Arctic and…