The son of Ansel Adams, whose photos helped expand the national park system, will attend the opening festivities of the West Coast premiere of “Fragile Waters.”
The traveling display of 119 photographs, many not previously exhibited, will be at the Maritime Museum of San Diego and feature black and white images by environmentalists Adams, Ernest H. Brooks II and Dorothy Kerper Monnelly.
Brooks, Monnelly and Dr. Michael and Jeanne Adams (son and daughter-in law of Ansel Adams, who died in 1984 at age 82) will attend the opening. The exhibit lasts from March 1 to Sept. 15.
“We don’t think enough about water,” said Jeanne Adams, curator of the exhibit that launched in Newport News, Virginia. “We don’t think enough about how significant it is — and I wanted to change that.”
She put the traveling exhibit together as a response to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
“I went through thousands of pictures,” she told a local paper. “I looked at water as oceans and river. I looked at water as sky and vapor. I looked at water as icebergs and as waterfalls. And then I picked out what you see here so you could really put your arms around the idea and see the bigger picture.”
Adams combined Brooks’ underwater images with Monnelly’s studies of the Great Marsh in Massachusetts.
“But it wasn’t long before she expanded the original concept to include an additional collection of works by her celebrated father-in-law, whose arresting pictures of mountain streams and coastal surf could combine with the other photographs to trace the path of water from the snow-covered highlands down to the shore and then the depths of the ocean,” said the review.
All three artists spent their lives near an ocean, and their works will be displayed aboard ship on the North Embarcadero at 1492 N. Harbor Drive, San Diego.
A series of panel discussions and lectures are scheduled. Admission to the exhibit is included with normal Museum admission — $16 for adults, $8 for children, with group rates available.
Some lectures and presentations may be an additional charge. See sdmaritime.org or call 619-234-9153 ext 101 for more information.
The exhibit debuted in June 2013 at The Mariners Museum in Virginia and later went to the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida, the Massillon Museum in Ohio and Las Cruces Museum of Art in New Mexico.
