March 22, 2022

Keeper of the Waters

Susan Hoffman Fishman 

for Artists & Climate Change blog

For the last 50+ years, eco-artist and environmental activist Betsy Damon has devoted herself to community building – the coming together of individuals to achieve a common purpose. Since the 1980s, after a decade of engaging the public through public performances in New York City, she has worked at the intersection of art and science, focusing on the topic of water and on creating models for communities in the United States and China to know and become stewards of their own water sources. The brief descriptions below, highlighting four of Damon’s many exhibitions, ecological and sustainable design projects, publications, and organizations are only a brief glimpse into her prolific and important body of work.

Damon’s first major project on water came about after a cross-country camping trip with her children in 1983, during which she observed a number of dry riverbeds whose once flowing waters had been dammed and redirected. As a result of this experience and a growing reconnection to the natural world, she conceived of a project that would bring attention to the environmental loss that the dry riverbeds represented and serve as a living memory of the missing water. Damon was able to realize the project, called A Memory of Clean Water, when she brought together a group of master papermakers and local artists to create a paper casting covering 250 feet of a dry riverbed in Castle Rock, Utah. The stunning and powerful piece was installed in seven venues across the country from 1986 through 1991, including at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts; the University of Wisconsin at Madison; Everhart Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania; MoMA PS1 in New York City; and others.  

A Memory of Clean Water was pivotal to the evolution of Damon’s practice. During its creation, as she was working on her hands and knees placing paper pulp over rocks, she looked up and realized that the patterns of stars in the sky mirrored the patterns in the riverbed. Profoundly moved by this personal epiphany, she promised herself to learn as much as she could about water and has spent the rest of her life since then fulfilling that promise. 

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