Enid Baxter Ryce and her students embarked upon on a semester-long walking tour of the Salinas, CA watershed. After investigating the community, history and ecology of the watershed, they made a film on the Carr Lake Project (a public urban open space/land and water remediation project) that was distributed by the City of Salinas. They made a second film, describing ecological and cultural sites connected by the Salinas watershed for the Return of the Natives restoration and education project.
Water, CA is a series of 22 contemporary projects engaging the history, mystery and challenges of California’s Water, co-directed by Enid Baxter Ryce and Nicole Antebi, Water, CA is a multimedia experiment in geography that incorporates mythological and playful understandings of complex histories. Water, CA is a website and traveling exhibition featuring essays, painting, photography, video animations, essays and a California water timeline.
The project became two Museum exhibitions. The first “Liquid Assets” took place at the Crocker Museum 2011 -2012 (supported by the Irvine Foundation). Inspired by art from the Crocker’s permanent collection, this exhibit featured 21 works laid out as a spatial dictionary offering perspectives on how water defines life in the region. It featured a mini-film festival curated by the Sundance Film Festival’s associate programmer Mike Plante and special water-based tours led by artist Enid Baxter Ryce, highlighting the environmental policy, ecological and historical implications of featured artworks, a performance by the Spillit Quikkers, a local old-time string band, a water lab created by the Water Underground and interactive water-themed art with iPads.
For “Facing the Sublime in Water, CA at the Armory Center for the Arts 2012-2013 (supported by the National Endowment for the Arts) and curated by Irene Tsatsos, Enid created the films series THE WEST based on the timelines that she wrote of the history of Water in California. She created a series of oil paintings depicting California before and after water engineering, and the watercolor paintings for the website interface
Both museum exhibitions were successful. The Crocker’s concluded in a festival with 1500 people in attendance. Enid’s paintings and films at the Armory Center for the Arts were written about in several publications including the Los Angeles Times and Artillery Magazine. They were subsequently exhibited at the Kellogg Museum in Pomona, and THE WEST went on to be part of the Codex Dynamic exhibition at the DUMBO Arts festival in Brooklyn, NY.
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At the invitation of WEAD (the Women’s’ Environmental Artist Directory) Enid Baxter Ryce curated a site specific exhibition, interpretive materials and series of programs on the subject of Sea Change (Sea Level Rise) at the Hayward Shoreline Interpretive Center in 2013. (images, video, link to exhibition statement.)
Enid also created a participatory art project and interpretive materials on the subject for First Night Monterey during which participants sprayed a wax model of the local watershed with water to simulate precipitation and flooding while defining the watershed.
Enid created a series of painted maps depicting sea level rise projections for that watershed that flanked the activity. (images)
In 2014 and 2012 Enid Baxter Ryce was the arts curator for the Biennial Bay-Delta Science conference – the largest conference for scientists focusing on water and the Bay-Delta. She was a Plenary speaker each year and chaired special panels on Arts and Science. She curated site-specific art exhibitions and experiences at the conference. The art works featured participatory low-tech projects created by artists including the Water Underground, Nicole Antebi, Amy Blount Lay, May Jong, Rachel Mayeri, MiniCine, and Minoosh Zoomordinia.
T-shirts for the National Science Foundation’s national outreach tour of Tribal Colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities created by Enid Baxter Ryce.
An animation about the migration patterns of the Western Monarch commissioned by the Pacific Grove Natural History Museum for permanent exhibition. Created by Enid Baxter Ryce with Rose Mercurio.