Thursday, September 11 through Saturday, October 4, 2025
“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
― Toni Morrison
As Morrison conveys in a talk at the New York Public Library in 1986, all water has a memory. Her observation seems prescient. In this moment of urgent climate catastrophe, extreme flash flooding has affected communities in New Mexico, North Carolina, Texas, and even Kansas City throughout the summer of 2025.
The selected artists in The River Remembers create timely artworks that observe and respond to the human impact on local waterways, particularly the Blue River. Stretching for 42 miles from Johnson County, KS through Jackson County, MO, the Blue River is known as Kansas City’s river. Residents have an environmental responsibility to protect these waters, as two-thirds of all water in the Kansas City metropolitan area drains into the Blue River.
Dance artist Katie Brennan directed the film Snaking Through with the collaborative efforts of the performers, editor Non Edwards, and videographer David Steele Overholt. Filmed over the course of a year, Snaking Through documents the Blue River in all its seasons. The video integrates site-specific dance with images of the water’s surface, riverbanks, and bridges from the headwaters to its industrial area exit toward the Missouri River.
The site of the Blue River captivated artist Graham Carroll, who re-configures recycled cans into small pinhole cameras. He affixes these DIY devices to trees or other sites and captures long stretches of time from a photographic perspective.
Artist Trey Hock conceptualized the project Blue River Road Investigators in 2018 as a means to explore the complexities of Blue River Road. During Open Spaces in 2018, the artist provided public tours of an abandoned stretch of Blue River Road closed to vehicle traffic. Hock’s work Retrospect features re-creations of performance ephemera from the original long-form performance work.
Water has inspired the artistic practice of Lynn Benson for her DROPS series over the last fifteen years. This exhibition features a finite selection of DROPS that reference the Blue River, which flows into the Missouri River and ultimately the Mississippi River. Each waterway or site is tied to specific environmental issues, such as manmade intervention of dams, flooding issues, or the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.
Artist Mona Cliff often connects traditional Indigenous knowledge systems to the present day in her artistic practice. Cliff’s work has alluded to the Seventh Generation principle, in which some Native communities believe that our decisions should influence a sustainable world for the seven generations that follow.
Overall, this selection of artworks touches upon the fragile, precarious state of our natural world. The Blue River acts as a microcosm in the local Kansas City environment that is representative of the national and global ecosystem. Local organizations such as the Heartland Conservation Alliance are actively trying to protect and restore the Blue River watershed. When considering the future generations, this exhibition prompts viewers to probe their individual use of water and natural resources and ask ourselves: could we be doing more?
CO-CURATED BY
Katie Brennan & Kimi Kitada
FEATURED ARTISTS
Lynn Benson, Katie Brennan, Graham Carroll, Mona Cliff, Non Edwards, Trey Hock, David Steele Overholt
Cover Image: Lynn Benson, DROPS, Niobrara River and Missouri River west of Gavins Point Dam near the South Dakota, Nebraska border. 2012-2022. Glass, acrylic, film, pencil, ink. 4 by 4 by 1 inch.
Exhibition Details
