Stories Water Tell

Anne Neely and Robert Zimmerman

Tuesday, October 21, 2014, 6:00 - 7:00 pm 

MIT Broad Institute, 7 Cambridge Center, Monadnock Room
Cambridge, MA 02142

Studying water - as both Anne Neely and Robert Zimmerman do, illuminates how everything is connected, even in ways we do not yet know.  The condition of water sources both locally and globally, is an urgent matter. This conversation centered around water and offered ways to visualize the problem through the visceral connections in Anne's paintings, and learn from Robert what the Charles River Watershed Association does to raise public awareness of the issues around water in our part of the world and beyond.

Robert Zimmerman is the Executive Director of the Charles River Watershed Association. Founded in 1965, CRWA is a private nonprofit environmental research and advocacy organization charged with using science and the law to protect and enhance the Charles River and its watershed. During his tenure, CRWA has become a leading authority on the science of water in urban watersheds, and has developed programs that address stormwater pollution, water quality, low instream flow, nutrient loading, habitat protection and restoration, community zoning, suburban sprawl, sustainable development, the economics of water infrastructure transformation, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. The Charles River and CRWA were the 2011 winners of the International River Foundation's Theiss International Riverprize.

Anne Neely is a Boston painter represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York and Catherine Hammond Gallery in Ireland. Her work has been the subject of more than twenty solo gallery and museum exhibitions in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Ireland. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Brooklyn Museum, the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her exhibit Water Stories: A Conversation in Painting and Sound is currently at the Museum of Science on view through January 5, 2015. In a post about Neely's work National Geographic Society Freshwater Fellow Sandra Postel writes, "She conjures the mystery and magic of water, but also confronts us with its seemingly discordant duality: floods and droughts, harmony and conflict, life and death. Each of us is about two-thirds water. Anne's water stories are our stories."