Water-Worlds: Ripple Effects or Sea Change?

Curators
Evan MacCarthy & Marjorie Rubright

Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Spring 2024

Related Arts & Scholarly Programming
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This exhibit is an outgrowth of many cross-disciplinary campus-wide collaborations. At the Kinney Center, we are in the midst of a multi-year project entitled, the Renaissance of the Earth, which explores what it means to engage the early modern past with questions about our environmental future. Through a range of cross-disciplinary collaborative models, it puts students, artists, and scholars at the center of an interdisciplinary research mandate with the goal of discovering diverse avenues for creating sustainable and equitable life. The Renaissance of the Earth joins as an investigator with the Anthropocene Lab, an interdisciplinary group of humanists, scientists, social scientists, and artists who seek new interdisciplinary narratives about the Anthropocene in an effort to engage the deep past and shared futures, humans and non-human communities. 

This year, under the directorship of Prof. Evan MacCarthy, the Center has launched the Elements series, an arts and humanities project which explores the four classical elements of earth, air, fire, and water through a variety of cultural lenses across disciplines and across time. 

Water-Worlds emerges at the crosscurrent of these conversations.

In the exhibition cases, you’ll discover water-worlds depicted in drama, poetry, novels, natural philosophy, early earth science, music, origin myths, fables and more. As you explore, we invite you to consider how these water-worlds transform by way of subtle ripple effects and stunning sea changes. Much of what you’ll discover is drawn from the Kinney Center collections as well as works of Shakespeare on loan by a generous friend of the Center. Our exhibit also features the contemporary poetry of Joan Naviyuk Kane. Inside these works, water appears in all its states (from ice, frost, and snow to liquid and vapor). In adopting water as an Element we are exploring at the Kinney Center throughout 2024, we are interested in how humans have engaged the changing, moving states and qualities of water: melting, freezing, drying, evaporating, flowing, soaking, dripping, rising, flooding, poisoning, disappearing, cleansing, nourishing, preserving. In this exhibit and our programming in the months ahead, we will explore human and non-human contexts of the creative, destructive, and restorative powers of our waterworlds. 

Co-curators Evan MacCarthy and Marjorie Rubright