Hear from the artists behind the exhibitions
Dear Body of Water, on display in Mayer Gallery December 5 through May 2, 2026.
Gretchen Ernster Henderson is a body of water, an intermedia artist, and the Spence L. Wilson Distinguished Professor in Humanities at Rhodes College near the Mississippi River in Memphis, TN. Her fifth book, Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (Trinity University Press 2023), has been seeping from deserts of the West into intermedia publications, exhibitions, performances, and field practices, including the participatory prompt of Dear Body of Water (with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center, and national coalition of Poets for Science): inviting people to share their relationships with bodies of water. Through WaterWays, she cultivates community-engaged repertoires that blend restoring and restorying watersheds. Gretchen is grateful for recent artist fellowships from Fallingwater, Lucas Artist Program at Montalvo Arts Center, the University of Wyoming’s Neltje Center for Excellence in Creativity and the Arts, and Leopold Writing Program. In 2025-2026, she is the Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Fellow at Harvard University. Recent work has appeared in Ecotone, Brevity, Arnoldia, Orion, Landscape Architecture Plus/LA+, TSLL, and Storied Deserts: Reimagining Global Arid Lands. Gretchen is interested in acoustic ecologies and communal practices that sound gaps of cultural and institutional histories to facilitate participatory spaces for exchanging ways of knowing to collectively support our human and more-than-human world. Upstream and downstream, she is grateful to continually learn from and with bodies of water: the lifeblood of our shared planetary home.
https://www.gretchenhenderson.com/
