TELECONNECTIONS - Joan Price installed the Colorado Plateau exhibit at the Seacoast Science Center at Odion Point, New Hampshire, in the summer of 2006.

   The exhibit was designed to incorporate a graphic illustration of the storm tracks that originate in the Southwest (the empty space) flowing over the Northeast Coast influencing air quality and climate events. Viewers then realized the “teleconnection” between the Southwest and the Northeast region weather events — the interdependence of two or more geologically separate regions—by virtue of a shared climate pattern.

Dialogue Between Two Views : The Art and Science of Climate Patterns on the Colorado Plateau has been  a portable poster format exhibited at schools, public spaces, conferences and educational events. This online exhibit is an electronic catalog to accompany the exhibit.

Curator Joan Price, M.F.A., has harbored this effort for over thirty years. As a multi-media presentation, the visuals and narrative have morphed many times in the past three decades; originally a magazine article “The Earth is Alive” published around the world; a book advocating protection for the indigenous people and homelands of two important mountain highlands, the Colorado Plateau and the Tibetan Plateau, published in Europe; an interpretive exhibit at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico: a slide show with soundtrack toured around the United States and Europe; and currently the portable exhibit funded, in part, by the Tides Foundation.

 During that time, significant change has taken place in both climate studies and other sciences. The emergence of fluid dynamics has created an important view to understanding living forms in wind and water.

The science of anthropology and archeology, among others, began to regularly consult with contemporary Native Americans after decades of “saving vanishing cultures,” realizing that Native American communities in the Southwest had only gone underground, to reemerge as the younger generations became fluent in the English language and became, themselves, anthropologists and scholars, to represent and interpret their indigenous ways of knowledge.

The wealth of comparative images now available is difficult to reduce to a few. Each panel of this exhibit is a room to enter and to peruse slowly — the viewer is invited to return over time, as if in a fine large museum exhibit.

Colorado Plateau Project: About Us

TWO VIEWS — A photograph of                                lightning striking pines trees, above,  and a petroglyph  with a zig zag serpent, below, represent lightning passing through a pine tree. The photograph and the petroglyph record a momentary  drama with the power to unite heaven and earth and bring hope according to Dr. Rina Swentzell, below.