California: The Art of
Water
July 13 - November 28, 2016
Extended object labels
- Ansel Adams
- U.S.A., 1902-1984
- Shasta Dam and Mount Shasta,
1961
- Gelatin silver print
- Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona:
Ansel Adams Archive, L.44.2.2015
-
- In the 1950s, the American Trust Company commissioned
Adams to create photographs for The Pageant of History in Northern California,
a book that honored the company's centenary. The publication features Adams's
only known photograph of Mount Shasta, which focuses on one of the largest
hydraulic projects in United States history. Since its construction, Shasta
Dam has been hailed as a wonder of American engineering; it also has been
the focus of intense criticism because of its devastating effect on local
fish populations and its flooding of lands that belong to the Wintu tribe.
-
- Adams's bird's-eye view depicts a harmonious relationship
between human ingenuity and natural capital, which is reinforced by the
poetic text that accompanies the image in the book: "To the north,
snow gleams deeper on the majestic old volcano, Shasta; to the east, the
Sierra glitters, a wave of snow peaks hundreds of miles long. To hoard
this winter water and the summerlong melting of eternal snows, dams have
been built; from these new lakes, and from flumes such as the miners built
centuries ago, water rushes down steep penstocks against the blade of turbines.
And power strides forth across the land."
-
-
-
- Nicole Antebi
- U.S.A., b. 1975
- Tilapia Jetty, 2007
- Video
- Nicole Antebi Collection, L.51.1.2016
-
- Antebi's video of the Salton Sea is addressed to a select
art audience familiar with artist Robert Smithson's 1970 Spiral Jetty,
an immense dirt and rock spiral in Utah's Great Salt Lake. Like Smithson's
earthwork, Antebi's video explores the human ability to manipulate nature.
She converts Smithson's grand flourish into the death spiral of an exhausted
environment. Decomposing fish flop on top of one another, brought up by
the shovelful from murky water that laps at the shoreline.
-
-
-
- Albert Bierstadt
- U.S.A., b. Germany, 1830-1902
- Lake Tahoe, Spear Fishing by Torchlight, c. 1875
- Oil on canvas
- Private collection, L.6.1.2016
-
-
-
- Albert Bierstadt
- U.S.A., b. Germany, 1830-1902
- Sacramento River Valley,
c. 1872-73
- Oil on canvas
- Private collection, L.6.2.2016
-
- In the early 1870s, the celebrated artist Albert Bierstadt
portrayed the valley around the Sacramento River as the kind of pristine
wilderness that appealed to America's art establishment. In fact, the forest
in the painting was one of many places in California that had been shaped
over millennia by Native Americans. Long before Bierstadt's arrival, tribes
living in areas of irregular rainfall created parklike oak woodlands to
supply acorns, one of their staple foods.
-
- Native American communities flourished in California
by strategic harvesting, pruning, sowing, and burning to encourage plants
that thrived in dry regions. This work took place on such an immense scale
that many of the state's ecosystems, including oak forests, coastal prairies,
and dry montane meadows, developed as a result of them. The whole of California
was their canvas, made up of carefully tended habitats that supported some
of the highest density tribal populations in North America and some of
its most diverse societies.
-
-
-
- Samuel Marsden Brookes
- U.S.A., b. England, 1816-1892
- Steelhead Salmon, 1885
- Oil on wood panel
- Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Museum
Purchase, L.45.18.2015
-
- In 1885, Brookes painted a pair of large steelhead salmon
next to a stream in a shaded woodland. The size of the fish and the unspoiled
brook signify a healthy riparian habitat at a time when news about the
precipitous decline of California's once abundant salmon population was
spreading around the state. Hydraulic mining, agriculture, urban development,
and the proliferation of dams ruined many watersheds that sustained salmon
and other wildlife.
-
- In Brookes's time, as today, salmon were icons of the
health of California's river systems. Several of the state's salmon species
are now on the brink of extinction; one of the most serious threats to
their survival is the diversion and depletion of streams on public lands
for illegal cannabis cultivation.
-
-
-
- George Henry Burgess
- U.S.A., b. England, 1831-1905
- View of San Francisco in 1850,
1878
- Oil on canvas
- Private collection, L.6.3.2016
-
- In 1878, silver king James Clair Flood commissioned Burgess
to paint this panorama of San Francisco. It shows the city as it appeared
at the peak of the gold rush, when prospectors' tents covered the hillsides
and the bay was glutted with ships abandoned by gold seekers. San Franciscans
who saw Burgess's painting marveled at the transformation of their city
in the intervening 28 years. By 1878, San Francisco's streets were lined
with banks, hotels, churches, and restaurants. Real estate developers made
room for the expanding metropolis by filling in large portions of the marshland
that rimmed the waterfront and by diverting an abundant complex of local
creeks and streams that ran into the bay.
-
-
-
- Edward Burtynsky
- Canada, b. 1955
- Owens Lake #1, 2009
- Chromogenic print
- Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery, Los
Angeles, L.2.2.2016
-
-
-
- Edward Burtynsky
- Canada, b. 1955
- Row-Irrigation, Imperial Valley,
2009
- Chromogenic print
- Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery, Los
Angeles, L.2.1.2016
-
-
- Engraved by W. L. Ormsby
- U.S.A., 1809-1883
- after George William Casilear
- U.S.A., 1811-1893
- Henry Bainbridge
- U.S.A., active 19th century
- Views of Sacramento City as it appeared during the
great inundation in January 1850, c. 1850
- Lithograph with hand-coloring
- Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley, L.64.2.2015
-
- In the winter of 1850, during the heyday of the gold
rush, a catastrophic flood stuck the city of Sacramento. Located in the
middle of a vast floodplain that supported huge numbers of fish and waterfowl,
the low-lying community flooded regularly in its early days. Some histories
of early California report that Spanish explorers discovered the valley
when it was entirely inundated in a year of unusually heavy rainfall, leading
them to believe that California was an island. Various European maps from
the 16th to the 18th century show California as a large landmass hovering
off the coast of North America.
-
-
-
- William A. Coulter
- U.S.A., 1849-1936
- Stockton Channel, 1884
- Oil on canvas
- The Haggin Museum, Stockton California, L.52.1.2016
-
-
-
- Edward S. Curtis
- U.S.A., 1868-1952
- Before the White Man Came,
Palm Cañon, 1924
- Photogravure
- Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Museum
Purchase, L.45.1.2015
-
-
-
- Robert Dawson
- U.S.A., b. 1950
- Owens Valley Water Leaving Owens Valley and Arriving
in Los Angeles (diptych), 1989
- Gelatin silver print
- Lent by the artist, L.67.1.2015
-
- "The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant
in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens
River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly
like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate
Owens water after its airless passage through mountain pipes and siphons.
As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this
constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest,
not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement
of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and weirs
and drains, in plumbing on a grand scale."
-
- -Joan Didion, "Holy Water," 1979
-
-
-
- Robert Dawson
- U.S.A., b. 1950
- San Luis Drain, Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge,
California, 1985
- Gelatin silver print
- Gift of the artist, 2000.259.5
-
- Dawson's photograph positions the viewer at the terminus
of a canal that points like an arrow towards a distant horizon. The highly
engineered waterscape of the image conflicts with the title of the work,
which identifies the place as a refuge for nature. Part of the Central
Valley Project that brings water from the Sierra Nevada to cities and farms
in Southern California, the wetland of the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge was
created in 1970 with runoff from agricultural lands. It was a sump for
herbicides, insecticides, and toxic minerals that decimated fish and bird
populations. The photographer made this picture at a time when the name
"Kesterson" was synonymous with the poisoning of the natural
environment.
-
-
-
- Robert Dawson
- U.S.A., b. 1950
- Tunnel, Feather River, 1987
- Gelatin silver print
- Lent by the artist, L.67.2.2015
-
- This photograph provides a glimpse of a lush forest through
the stone walls and arched concrete vault of a tunnel along the Feather
River. The river, which flows from the northern Sierra, is one of the main
sources of water for the California State Water Project. The image offers
an intimate view of a vast hydraulic network that sends Feather River water
hundreds of miles away to Central and Southern California.
-
-
-
- Robert Dawson
- U.S.A., b. 1950
- Untitled #1, 1970
- From the Mono Lake Series
- Gelatin silver print
- Gift from the Alinder Collection, 1987.140
-
-
-
- Robert Dawson
- U.S.A., b. 1950
- San Francisco's entire water supply goes through this
pipe, near Mather, California, 1992
- Gelatin silver print
- Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona:
Water in the West Archive, L.44.3.2015
-
-
-
- Edwin Deakin
- U.S.A., b. England, 1838-1923
- Samuel Marsden Brookes Painting in His Studio, 1876
- Oil on canvas
- Private collection, L.6.4.2016
-
- California artist Samuel Marsden Brookes was famous during
the 19th century for his highly realistic paintings of freshly caught salmon
from the state's rivers. A local journalist wrote about a woman who encountered
one of Brookes's works in a San Francisco gallery: "We saw a lady
in a new silk outfit involuntarily spread her sunshade . . . and prudently
recede, like one fearing that a sudden flop of the scaly, dripping captive
might spoil her finery."
-
- A painting of salmon by Brookes is hanging on the east
side of the doorway to your left.
-
-
-
- Ferdinand Deppe (?)
- Germany, 1794-1861
- San Gabriel Mission, 1832
- Oil on canvas
- Laguna Art Museum Collection, Gift of Nancy Dustin Wall
Moure, L.3.1.2016
-
-
- Ross Edward Dickinson
- U.S.A., 1903-1978
- Valley Farms, 1934
- Oil on canvas
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S.
Department of Labor, L.4.2.2016
-
- In this picture of farms in a California valley, Dickinson
places a river in the foreground, the lifeblood of crops growing in an
arid landscape. Sunburned hills dominate the image, and smoke from a fire
burning in the upper left side of the canvas adds a sense of menace to
the scene.
-
- The system of land organization in California discouraged
many newcomers from establishing small farms like the ones in the painting.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, large portions of the state's agricultural
lands were divided into vast tracts that depended on increasingly technical
irrigation systems. The owners of these lands came to be known as "growers"
rather than "farmers."
-
-
-
- A. J. Doolittle
- U.S.A., active 19th century
- Leander Ransom
- U.S.A., active 19th century
- New Map Of The State of California and Nevada Territory, 1863
- Lithograph
- Published by Warren Holt, San Francisco
- Courtesy David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map
Center, Stanford Libraries, L.35.2.2016
-
-
-
- Peter Goin
- U.S.A., b. 1951
- Golf Course near Coachella,
2007, printed 2016
- Digital pigment photograph, printed on Hahnemühle
watercolor 350 gsm paper
- Lent by the artist, L.24.1.2016
-
-
-
- Peter Goin
- U.S.A., b. 1951
- Irrigated grid, new peach orchard; Sutter Buttes in
background, Sutter County, 2006
- Digital pigment photograph, printed on Hahnemühle
watercolor 350 gsm paper
- Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley, L.64.7.2015
-
-
-
- William Hammond Hall
- U.S.A., 1846-1934
- Santa Ana Canal, Bear Valley Irrigation, San Bernardino
County, c. 1880s
- Cyanotype panorama
- California Historical Society, L.48.2.2015
-
- As the first state engineer of California, Hall developed
water systems in different parts of the state. His photographs of the Santa
Ana Canal attest to the complexity of hydraulic projects in Southern California
that helped transform desert land into the center of a lucrative orange-growing
industry.
-
-
-
- Anthony Hernandez
- U.S.A., b. 1947
- Everything #2, 2004
- Chromogenic print
- Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Gift
of the Art Guild, L.45.4.2015
-
- Hernandez's picture of a dripping drain is connected
to his memories of playing along the Los Angeles River as a child. Although
the water in the drain flows in a trickle, the black center and large diameter
of the pipe portend something ominous. The Los Angeles River is a shallow
stream for most of the year; after heavy rainfall it can become a raging
cataract. Following a series of devastating floods in the early 20th century,
city engineers created an extensive drainage system and lined most of the
riverbed with concrete.
-
-
-
- Anthony Hernandez
- U.S.A., b. 1947
- Public Fishing Area #1, Herbert C. Legg Lake, 1979
- Gelatin silver print
- Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Gift
of the Art Docents in honor of George Neubert with matching funds from
the National Endowment for the Arts, L.45.5.2015
-
-
-
- Thomas Hill
- U.S.A., b. England 1829-1908
- Thomas Hill and Virgil Williams with Wives, Fishing, c. 1873
- Oil on canvas
- Collection of the Chambers Family, courtesy of Joel B.
Garzoli Fine Art, L.70.2.2015
-
-
-