Images from the Mississippi Headwaters in Northern Minnesota to the confluence of the Ohio River.

9x12” softcover, 84 pages

Since 2011, artists Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan have collaborated on defining what a watershed looks like and how people use them. They have traveled to over 400 locations across the Mississippi-Missouri basin placing Reuter’s glass cairns in local watersheds photographed by Rowan. Every glass cairn is strategically placed in specifically scouted scenes of some of the most beautiful and unexpected sites along the upper Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers. The cairns are handmade sculptures assembled from household or antique glass. The cairns mark the watersheds metaphorically as fragile, beautiful, and deeply connected to everyday life. The large-scale, color photographs vividly bring to life the locale and intimately reveal the connections of the people and communities to their local watershed.

For each Watershed Cairns location, Reuter assembles a site-specific, found-glass sculpture, or cairn, that is temporarily placed on land or in the water to mark the watershed. Rowan photographs the landscape. After the cairn’s location, including its latitude and longitude, has been recorded, the cairn is removed and stored. The photographs are displayed online; later, they appear in museum and gallery exhibitions of large-scale photographic prints and their accompanying cairn sculptures.

All images are labeled with the cairn site’s street address and GPS coordinates to enable people to visit the actual sites where the cairns were photographed and to note changes over the span of years (construction, pollution, or erosion) or with the seasons (water levels, plant varieties, or human activity). Text accompanying each image discusses the watershed in that location.

Watershed Cairns®: Water Marked with Art visually connects people, land, and water, and provides an opening for community discussion about fresh water. The current series celebrates the Mississippi River basin’s water wealth. The Mississippi-Missouri basin is one of the world’s largest watersheds covering 40 percent of the continental US and providing drinking water for 50 million people, and irrigation for 90 percent of the nation’s agricultural exports.