Exhibit—The State of Water

Our Most Valuable Resource

June 16–August 11
John Edward Smith Gallery (Kemin Cultivation Center)
Included with General Admission

Only 0.007 percent of the planet’s water is available to fuel and feed its 8 billion people. Brad Temkin’s photography puts visitors face-to-face with the systems and techniques that deliver our most valuable natural resource. In doing so, the exhibition encourages us to see water conservation as a process we can all get involved in.

Water stands as the most important chemical compound used by humans daily, and polling shows many Americans care deeply about water quality. But despite highly visible water crises—like the high lead levels in Flint, Michigan, and scarcity within the Navajo Nation—the quality and safety of drinking water often are taken for granted. It comes out of a faucet or a fountain, initiated by an easy turn of the knob or push of a button. In truth, that water has taken a much longer and complicated journey to reach us, having traveled through a vast network of systems that most of us will never see.

In The State of Water: Our Most Valuable Resource, Guggenheim award-winning photographer Brad Temkin continues his longstanding attention to our relationship with nature—how we appreciate and accommodate it, and how it accommodates us. Temkin’s pictures celebrate ideas in water and wastewater engineering design, showing the inventiveness in architecture and infrastructure necessary to meet our needs and to accommodate nature.

A Program of ExhibitsUSA, a national division of Mid-America Arts Alliance
and The National Endowment for the Arts

—PRESENTING SPONSOR—