Water Color

Petaluma Museum hosts artists as they honor our wetlands

Now entering its sixth decade in operation, the Petaluma Historical Library and Museum continues to explore the unique cultural history of Petaluma. Its current exhibit, "Time & Tide: An Artful Exploration of Petaluma’s Wetlands," collects local artists to shine a wild dash of styles and colors on the wetlands that gave rise to the city and still play a central role in civic life. 

The show is inspired by the educational work of the Petaluma Wetlands Alliance and other groups engaging residents with the strange, wonderful slough that wraps our town, the creeks that feed and flood, eternal cycles too easily forgotten.

One of the marvels of my Petaluma parenting journey was watching my son stand on a Santa Rosa Junior College stage in third grade to make a plea for the preservation of the wetlands. It was his second year presenting with the support of his teachers and student mentors, and he was gaining mastery over the material, evident in his tiny conviction about the watershed. 

At Time and Tide, letters and doodles from primary-age students in glass cases along the wall form the backbone of the exhibition: missives from children who will carry the work of preserving the Petaluma River into the future, against all odds. 

“What’s powerful about Petaluma is this network of nonprofits, scientists, educators, and cultural institutions working together, sharing knowledge, building relationships, and engaging the public,” said show curator and the museum’s executive director, Stacey Atchley. “That kind of collaboration is what makes long-term resilience possible.”

While the collection ranges in style and subject (and even includes poems by Sonoma County poet laureate David Seter and Petaluma Voice’s own Nate Seltenrich*), there is a coherence to the display. Collectivity is like that, a patchwork that makes something new and beautiful. The work creates “a layered portrait of the wetlands that you couldn’t get from any single point of view,” added Atchley. “It’s very much a community voice, rather than a curated aesthetic in one direction.” 

The standout piece is the painting “Ma Himme (Our Shell Mounds)” by Michelle Napoli. In the wall label – written in English and the language of the Coast Miwok – Napoli says that art is her way to “honor [her ancestral] homelands, waters, stories, language, and relatives.” Let the reader recall that for the Coast Miwok and other Native cultures of the region, "relatives" includes the rivers, the trees, and the birds that land, drink, and feed here on their seasonal way. 

Bright-orange and red paint grows all around an abstract shell mound. The spiritual structures that ringed the San Francisco Bay in precontact times are starting to be recovered through the actions of Native artists, activists, and leaders. The painting is messy, vibrant, and gratifying in its depiction of a landscape familiar to all who walk the wetlands whether for health, work, or pleasure, fecund like the long process of ecological stewardship.

Other images play in the light of the slough at different hours, use different techniques, take birds or grasses as subjects. Artists, like the rest of us, bring themselves to these peaceful spots around town where nature takes the lead, and call others to follow. 

Funded in part by the Southern California-based Foundation for Sustainability and Innovation, the show provides a striking reminder of how wetlands are the face of nature for Petaluma, in a time when we would do well to remember that the land needs us to care for it just as it, as best it can muster, cares for us.

"Time & Tide: An Artful Exploration of Petaluma’s Wetlands," shows at the Petaluma Historical Library and Museum, 20 4th St., Petaluma, from April 9-June 7. Open Thursday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Suggested $5 donation.

*In the spirit of full disclosure, you can read Nate's poem below:

"BLOOD"

Breath in, tide out

Tide in, breath out

See?

Channels, arteries

Flooding, saturating

Oxygen and nutrients

Flowing, in flux

Never still, always

In flux, flowing

To and from

Alive, giving life

From the ocean, the bay

The slough, the channel

The river

From the stream 

To the bay, the ocean

The sea becomes rain

The rain becomes sea 

The hills become mud

The mud holds the water

The water pushed by the rain

The water pulled by the moon

The moon around the planet 

The planet around the sun

Still, always

Tide out, breath in

Breath in, tide out