Speak While You Can
August 24, 2024 – December 1, 2024
This exhibit displays the resilience and creativity of Indigenous people and is one part of the fight to keep Native languages alive. Utilizing the vocabulary of various art forms, including printmaking, painting, photography, ceramics, and installation, the contemporary artists in the show comment on the state of their tribal languages and their relation to their communities and the world at large. “As the title Speak: Speak While You Can makes clear, these artists have an urgent message: that we must speak up with our art, proclaiming with visual voices the message that our languages are the lifeblood of our cultures.” Tony A. Tiger (Sac & Fox/Seminole/Muscogee) and Bobby C. Martin (Muscogee/Creek)
Creatividad silvestre | Wild Creativity
January 18, 2025 – May 4, 2025
How does a kangaroo gain energy as it bounces? Why do birds have different beaks? How does a prairie dog cool its home?
Creatividad silvestre | Wild Creativity invites visitors of all ages to explore fundamental concepts of biomimicry through hands-on design challenges, spotlighting the interplay between the art and science of nature and how it continues to inform our world. The exhibit reveals how animals and nature work in unique, sustainable, and efficient ways. Visitors can explore how our human-made world is inspired by the natural world, and how we can continue to use this unending inspiration to solve new and pressing challenges with sustainable engineering practices.
Snow: Tiny Crystals, Global Impact
May 17, 2025 – August 31, 2025
Snow: Tiny Crystals, Global Impact provides interactive learning experiences that explore the nature and wonder of snow and the impact of climate change on our snowy planet. Walk through a snowstorm for an up-close look at the crystals in different types of storms. Peek inside the snowpack to discover how it changes over time and how animals make their homes in snow. Learn how snow shapes and sustains life on Earth and about snow’s vital roles in sustaining our water supply and cooling our planet.
From the wonder of snow crystals, to the complexity of the layered snowpack, to unique stories of snow from Iñupiaq elders, Snow: Tiny Crystals, Global Impact offers experiences for visitors of all ages with a focus on learners ages 9–14. Explore all the ways this fundamental weather phenomenon impacts our lives—no matter where we live!
Walking in Antarctica
April 6, 2025 – August 11, 2025
In 2015, artist Helen Glazer traveled to Antarctica as a grantee of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, to photograph ice and geological formations for eventual production as photographic prints and sculpture. She worked out of remote Antarctic scientific field camps and had access to protected areas that can only be entered with government permits or in the company of a skilled mountaineer.
Inspired and informed by her experiences, Walking in Antarctica is an immersive, interdisciplinary exhibition bringing together photography, sculpture, and audio narrative to take the viewer on a journey through an extraordinary environment remote places that the tourist ships do not reach and few people get to witness in person. The exhibition is organized as a series of “walks” through remarkable Antarctic landscapes: over frozen lakes, around towering glaciers and baroque sea ice formations, into a magnificent frozen ice cave, across fields of surreal-looking boulders, and through a lively colony of nesting Adélie penguins. Visitors who have smartphones will be able to access an audio tour narrated by Glazer, drawn from a blog in which she recorded her experiences.
Through her artwork, Glazer strives to convey the wonder and complexity of the natural world to others, to motivate a desire to protect and preserve wild places. Her past study of earth science heightened her awareness of multiple factors shaping the land over time. In recognizing that complex patterns in nature express the particular physical forces at work, she became more attuned to the interplay among geology, climate, life forms, and human activity in a given location.
That awareness informs her particular artistic vision, while her innovative application of emerging 3D technologies have enabled her to capture and communicate this vision. Glazer’s sculptures of ice and rock formations are each generated from a series of still photographs taken on site from different angles and reconstructed as 3D scans by photogrammetry software. After further editing in 3D modeling software, the resulting digital files become the basis for hand-painted sculptures made with digital fabrication technologies—CNC routers or 3D printers.
The State of Water: Our Most Valuable Resource
August 30, 2025 – October 19, 2025
Seventy-one percent of the earth’s surface is covered in water, but only 0.007 percent of it is available to fuel and feed its eight billion people. This exhibit 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.
In The State of Water: Our Most Valuable Resource, Guggenheim award-winning photographer Brad Temkin continues his long-standing 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.
Temkin’s photographs document and reveal beauty in all states of water from sludge to pure; and advocates for our need to conserve and reclaim our most valuable and essential resource on Earth.
This bilingual exhibition (English/Spanish) is rich in STEAM information. Curious visitors of all ages will learn about the complexity of water purification and its immense importance in our day-to-day lives.
Aliento a Tequila | The Spirit of Tequila
August 30, 2025 – October 19, 2025
Aliento a Tequila (or The Spirit of Tequila) explores and celebrates the landscape, culture, and traditions that gave birth to tequila, Mexico’s mestizo national drink. The exhibit includes series of the original distilleries that literally founded the industry, as well as several artisanal tequileras committed to the ancestral ways of tequila-making, from harvest to bottle.
Agave dates back to the Aztec civilization as an important crop in Mexico. Since the 1600s, the people of western Mexico have cultivated blue agave from the red volcanic soil that blankets the region, to make what we know as tequila. Photographer Joel Salcido traveled across the state of Jalisco capturing images of distilleries and artisanal tequileras, including blue agave fields at sunset, the agave’s pineapple-like centers (piñas), elegantly shadowed barrel rooms (añejos), and, of course, the agave farmers themselves. Salcido’s photographs reveal not only the tequila making process but also the region’s traditions of culture and religion.
