Making Waves: Currents of Change
Opening Reception March 6, 5-7 pm
Closing Reception April 26, 3-5 pm
Making Waves: Currents of Change, curated by Belinda Chlouber, celebrates women artists and environmental consciousness during Women's History Month and Earth Day. The exhibition brings together a group of women with diverse artistic perspectives that examine the climate crisis, ecological relationships, and humanity's impact on our planet.
Spanning six gallery spaces in the historic Hotel Sequoia, The exhibition features works across media and processes, including painting, watercolor, installation art, printmaking, poetry, mixed media, sculpture, and community-created work,thoughtfully balancing urgent climate narratives with works that offer contemplation and hope.
The exhibition's title evokes both the literal presence of water—a precious resource increasingly at risk—and the metaphorical ripples created when women challenge the status quo and forge new paths forward. The timing is intentional—launching during Women's History Month and extending through Earth Day allows us to honor both the critical role women play in environmental advocacy and our collective responsibility to the planet.
Curator Statement: Water is both witness and warning. It sustains all life, holds memory, and reflects back what we have done to the world we inhabit. Making Waves: Currents of Change brings together a diverse group of Bay Area women artists whose work sits at the intersection of environmental consciousness and lived experience — painting, installation, printmaking, photography, poetry, and community engagement that asks us to pay attention.
Timed intentionally to honor Women’s History Month and Earth Day, this exhibition celebrates the long tradition of women as environmental stewards, activists, and visionaries. The title carries a double meaning: the literal presence of water as a precious and threatened resource, and the metaphorical ripples that emerge when women challenge the status quo and forge new paths forward.
Across six gallery spaces in the historic Hotel Sequoia, these artists do not look away. They illuminate endangered insects on the brink of disappearing, communities displaced by climate disaster, the sacred feminine power embedded in our oceans, and the beauty still worth protecting. From Christina Conklin’s algae sculptures reclaiming ancient goddess traditions, to Stephanie Dole’s meticulous portraits of California’s most overlooked endangered species, to the community circles created in our stairwell by twenty local artists — each work is an act of witness, and of will.
Poetry winds through the exhibition alongside the visual work, reminding us that language too can be a form of environmental action. Vintage suitcases carry stories of displacement and memory. A single scroll asserts the rights of water itself. Together, these works form a chorus — urgent, tender, and unrelenting.
As a curator, I am moved by the courage it takes to make art in the face of crisis — to insist on beauty, on meaning, on the possibility of change. The women in this exhibition have spent years, in some cases decades, bearing witness to what we are losing and imagining what we might yet save. Their work reminds us that change begins with a single act — a brushstroke, a poem, a circle made by hand — and builds, like water, into something that can reshape the world.
— Belinda Chlouber, Curator
Detail of Eliza Wilson Thomas’s artwork Red Flag in The Lions Den, Watercolor on paper, 2025