About this Event
"Water doesn't adapt to life, life adapts to water."
Art and activism have been the center of Betsy Damon’s work since 1985, when she cast a dry riverbed in handmade paper in Memory of Clean Water. In the years since, Damon has challenged herself to figure out what it would mean to take water as our teacher. This has led her to the idea that water isn’t a noun, but a verb. She founded Keepers of the Waters in 1990 and designed the Living Water Garden in Chengdu, China in 1997. Her subsequent artworks create moments of interaction between people and water, inviting a new kind of consciousness towards earth’s living systems. Her work reveals water as the connective, creative, and collaborative medium behind all life. Damon traverses the complexities of water, from a molecular scale to the levels of ecosystems and societies. Damon’s book, Water Talks, is available at betsydamon.com/book.
“The sage’s transformation of the world arises from solving the problem of water.”
—Lao Tze
BIO
Betsy Damon, an internationally acclaimed artist and 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, has been called a practical visionary and a humanist. Her work has been widely reviewed, exhibited, and taught. She’s known for her performance works like The 7,000-Year-Old Woman (1976) and her ecological designs like The Living Water Garden (1998) in Chengdu, China. She has directed many collaborative public performance events, most notably in Chengdu and in Lhasa, Tibet. Damon’s awards include the Guggenheim Foundation, Bush Foundation, Heinz Foundation, NEA, UN Habitat, Waterfront Center Top Honor, five awards from the ASLA, and others. In 2021, a solo exhibition of Damon's performance work, curated by Monika Fabijanska, was held at La MaMa Galleria in Manhattan.
For the past four decades, Damon’s work has focused on a central subject: water, which she reveals as the connective, creative, and collaborative medium behind all life. Her work traverses the complexities of water, from a molecular scale to the levels of ecosystems and societies. Damon’s work has been archived by Asia Art Archive and is available at aaa.org. Damon’s book, Water Talks, is available at betsydamon.com/book.
Event Venue
Online
USD 0.00