The library’s plans for Earth Month in April 2025 are kicking off early this year with a call for submissions to our Dear Body of Water exhibition to celebrate and honor one of earth’s most precious and essential resources—water.
In collaboration with GREEN (Georgetown Renewable Energy and Environment Network) and the Student Library Council, the library is inviting undergraduate and graduate student artists, poets, activists, and lovers of water to submit original visual art and written, mixed-media works that address bodies of water as fellow beings on this earth and cultivate care for watersheds.
Click here to submit work. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2025.
The artwork selected (paintings, drawings, poems, photographs, etc.) will be on display in the glass cases in the Community Gallery on the fourth floor of Lauinger Library from April 7 – October 6, 2025. Animations, videos, music, or other digital art can be shared with a still image and a QR code linking to the works in the accompanying online exhibition.
Student art may explore questions such as:
- What do you love about water?
- How does water melt into our histories, memories, dreams, griefs, hopes, and presence?
- What bodies of water are overlooked or neglected?
- More than water rights, how can we consider the rights of water?
This student exhibition will complement the Dear Body of Water exhibit in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections's Fairchild Art Gallery spaces on the 5th floor of Lauinger Library from February - May 2025. The 5th-floor exhibition will include works from University Archives, the Art Collection, rare books, and manuscripts that honor and recognize bodies of water.
The exhibitions were inspired by a visit to Georgetown from the founder of the Dear Body of Water initiative, Professor Gretchen Henderson in March 2024, for a lecture and book signing of her book, “Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea.” If you’d like to write a love letter to a beloved river, ocean, aquifer, creek, pond, or other body of water, visit the Dear Body of Water site and submit your work for our community exhibition.