Sponsored by Jewell Drewery, Jane and John Franck, Gale and Will Gravely, Tracie Heavner and Jim Frith, Helen S. and Charles G. Patterson Jr. Charitable Foundation Trust, Lynwood Artists, Melody Margrave, Sovah Health, Stuart and Tom Webster, Phyllia and Mike Wenkstern and What's Your Sign.
Leah Raintree is an artist based in Richmond, Virginia and Brooklyn, New York. Her artworks engage the interconnection between humanity, time and the Earth. She works through an experimental drawing practice that spans media, treating mark-making as a form of attentive translation, exploring how time, memory and phenomena are inscribed within the planet. Raintree grew up on a small farm in Virginia, drawing on her early experiences of “touching earth” to inform her projects. She often integrates site-specific materials, treating the Earth, time and matter as active participants in the work, while her ongoing "Timekeeper" drawings underscore the importance of process across her artistic practice.
“Legible Earth: The Fire Tapestries” marks the ten-year anniversary of the Valley Fire in Northern California, when Raintree’s sister and family lost their home to wildfire. Borrowing from the language of ancient tapestries that survive as storytellers, intricate line drawings are interwoven with washes of wildfire char. These intimate explorations address the global impacts of wildfire on ecological and human communities, alongside the process of bearing witness, renewal and repair.
The exhibition is a continuation of Raintree’s series “Legible Earth,” which explores the artifacts and inscriptions of climate change. “Legible Earth: Script” and “Score” engage the collection at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Core Repository, producing artworks using deep ocean sediments from the Arctic and Antarctic regions used by scientists in the study of ice sheet loss. In these multi-layered works, Raintree responds to these earthen materials through an improvisational drawing process, recalling maps, musical scores and other systems of notation.
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