Grantee Partner Spotlight: Watershed Cairns

Q: What is the most important thing that people should know about your work?

Libby Reuter: Watershed Cairns: Water Marked with Art aims to inform and inspire people to preserve and protect our freshwater resources. For ten years, photographer Joshua Rowan and I have traveled along rivers of the Mississippi/ Ohio/ Missouri Watershed temporarily placing and making 400 photographs of stacked glass sculptures-cairns. We collaborate with environmental organizations to learn and share information about the issues facing fresh water. The photos, with information about their location and the watershed, and glass cairns have been exhibited in Midwestern museums and on watershedcairns.com.

Q: How did you arrive at doing what you do?

Libby Reuter: Before the 1993 Mississippi River Flood, I hadn’t paid much attention to the rivers, they were just a thin blue line on the map or a minute of travel over a bridge, now they were creating havoc. At the time I was creating sculptures and working on Millennium Journey, a community project. Artist-friends and I bottled 1000 tiny bottles of “Flood Mud” to sell for flood relief. We didn’t sell many, but it started me thinking about rivers with watercolors based on old maps. My glass sculptures at the time were inspired by religious reliquaries. In 2010, I saw Joshua Rowan’s photographic exhibit and asked him to work with me on an idea that became Watershed Cairns.

Q: Who makes your work possible?

Libby Reuter: Our work has been supported by grants from the St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District, Missouri American Water, and Mississippi River Network. Partnerships with the Illinois Sierra Club and Missouri Coalition for the Environment, and exhibits at the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis; Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona; Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; National Great Rivers Museum and the Jacoby Art Center, Alton, Illinois, and the Audubon Centre at Riverlands, West Alton, Missouri; and St. Louis Galleries have provided income. The photographic prints and Watershed Cairns: Mississippi River North, are available for sale through our website. 

Thanks to our environmental and river-rat friends for sharing their knowledge and to friends and family who gave us glass, helped load and unload the van, and encouraged our foolishness.

Libby Reuter's Suggested Readings:

• Holding Back the River: The Struggle Against Nature on America’s Waterways, by Tyler J. Kelley, Avid Reader Press 2021
• Water: A Biography, by Giulio Boccaletti, Pantheon Books 2021
• “Exhibits From the American Water Museum” p63-72 in Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz, Graywolf Press, 2020