No landscape photographer at work today has done more to focus attention on the spectacular beauty of New England's threatened coastal marshes than Dorothy Kerper Monnelly. Her body of work has helped inspire a growing movement to protect this fine-tuned, biologically rich ecosystem—long maligned as a wasteland—from human encroachment and irreversible damage. Legendary naturalist Edward O. Wilson had called her "the Ansel Adams of the wetlands."
Monnelly's connection to the salt marsh is visceral, not intellectual. For more than 35 years, her life and work on the Massachusetts coast has been inextricably tied to the rise and fall of tidal creeks, the seasonal shifts in the marsh's flora and fauna, and the ever-changing skies illuminating the shifting dunes and prairielike sweep of spartina alterniflora. For Monnelly, the salt marsh is both artistic muse and spiritual anchor, a place that inspires her work as an artist and grounds her life as a community member, activist, and woman. Her photography succeeds in evoking this long-overlooked landscape's bracing, mysterious power through visual works that have an abstract, rigorously applied power all their own.
Press release -
SAN JOSE, California (March 3, 2017) – With recent rains and flooding following years of drought, water is very much on the minds of Californians. From March 17 to August 6, 2017, San Jose Museum of Art will present an exhibition devoted to celebrating this precious, essential resource and encourage dialogue about water. Fragile Waters: Photographs by Ansel Adams, Ernest Brooks II, and Dorothy Kerper Monnelly features 120 black-and-white photographs by three artists who have expressed their lifelong commitment to protecting the sanctity of the environment through the universal language of photography. Fragile Waters is one of three exhibitions at SJMA this spring to examine the environmental, humanitarian, and social aspects of water.
Salt Marsh Island, Clouds, Ipswich, MA, 2005
Gelatin ...
FRAGILE WATERS premiers at The Mariners Museum, Newport News, Virginia, the first of five scheduled U.S. museum venues.
FRAGILE WATERS calls attention to water, the critical resource, in all its beauty and power, presenting inspirational work of three renowned photographers; Ansel Adams, Ernest H. Brooks II, and Dorothy Kerper Monnelly.
Water is more than a resource. It is essential to all the life we know. Yet our oceans, rivers, lakes and other sources of water are in crisis. Extreme weather events, aquifer depletion, rights of access, toxic contaminants, fracking, pollution, floods, desertification, and the impact of rising seawater on urbanized deltas, are just a few of the water-related issues that confront us. The FRAGILE WATERS exhibition was born out of this concern.
The black-and-white photogra...