This exhibition, featuring works drawn from the Grinnell College Museum of Art’s permanent collection, takes its title from W.H. Auden’s poem, “First Things First,” in which water, fittingly, is the last word. Water’s paradoxical nature — life-sustaining and life-threatening, powerful and fragile, abundant and scarce, endangering and endangered — makes it a rich backdrop (if not the primary subject) for artists applying their own creative forces to one of life’s most essential and inscrutable elements.
Image: John F. Phillips, American|Canadian, (1945–2010), Distributing Water, Meredith March, Mississippi, 1966.