(bright music) (soft music) - I am Melissa Messina and I'm the guest curator of Maya Lin: A Study of Water.

This was a perfect combination, right?

I mean, Maya Lin, you don't get a much bigger name than that.

And the work is so incredibly important and I think it's important to have that conversation here.

As a guest curator, I'm constantly asking questions, who is your audience?

What do people want to see?

My role was really to bring all sides together and have a conversation about what is possible.

Maya Lin's representations of water, it's something that she's been interested in and focused on for much of her career.

So it seemed like a really natural fit to start from there and create an exhibition that really looked at all of her representations of water.

(audience clapping) - [Maya] I have been preoccupied with and obsessed with water for at least 30 years, and I don't quite know why.

Maybe there's something that just drew me to water.

I'm very committed and caring.

Environmentalist in water is the lifeblood of our planet and of us.

The Chesapeake Bay has played a very large part in many of mines in studio sculptures and people have asked, "well, why the Chesapeake?"

From an ecological point of view, it is one of the most critically important waterways in this country.

It is so beautiful as a form.

I love the Chesapeake.

It's called Folding the Chesapeake and it's made out of industrial glass marbles.

(soft music) I do like to ground you with what is right outside your front door in the natural world and I'm trying to capture in the medium's, sort of a reflectivity, which is so much a part of water.

And so when the sun hits it at certain times of day, it almost, it's like a light switch went on.

(bright music) We just went out to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and looked at oyster restoration.

Oysters play a big part.

Those oyster reefs could have significant protection for our coastal lands.

These are huge booms for both climate change, mitigation, storm surge, and as well as cleaning the bay and bringing back biodiversity.

Blue carbon habitats may stand alone as the most efficient biological reservoirs of stored carbon.

So you are here and the Chesapeake Bay becomes a huge solution to climate change.

If we rethink our farming, rethink the soils, rethink protection of the wetlands 'cause wetland sequester three times as much carbon as a tropical forest.

(soft music) How does a wave begin and end?

So the piece that you'll see here is called Flow and it became two by four landscape and it actually can't make up its mind if it's a hill or a cresting wave, but that's sort of the genesis.

And I love the ambiguity.

From the front, it looks like a cresting wave.

from the back, it felt like a hill.

Artists need to create on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy.

And I have been finding a lot of my time being focused much more on climate change, obsessed with how quickly we are losing the ice and the glaciers.

Scientists are saying the thickness is disappearing.

So it's going to melt a lot quicker now because it's so much thinner than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

And it's led to a series of works.

So the uppermost level is where we're at today and then the thinness, of course, expresses the vulnerability due to the fact that we're eating away the water's eating away at these ice areas from beneath.

I realized I needed to deal with what we're losing especially stuff you don't even realize is disappearing.

The species we will lose if we do not take action.

So it's just a wake up call and a call to action.

How can I get you to connect to nature in a different way?

Go to the website, explore a history of the world.

There's thousands of ecological histories, personal memories, and there are in-depth timelines.

There's over a hundred entries, charts, and ecological history of your bay.

What our ecological histories try to do is get you to understand massive abundance, what's missing, not to depress you, but almost leave you in awe of what nature can hold.

Nature's resilient.

And if you give it a chance, it comes back.

And so there's a whole echo throughout the timelines of that arc.

Nature's incredibly strong.

We're just not giving any chance to come back.

For me, it was always about can we just think differently about this?

Can we just put it in a perspective that kind of says this is fixable, this is doable.

We could all do something.

We could make a difference here.

(inspiring music) (inspiring music continues)