As an artist, Alberto Rey starts locally, works globally. His 2014 project on the plight of the Scajaquada River, for instance, was exhibited a few hundred feet away from his subject waterway at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Yet the exhibition, on the history, politics, and layers of failed planning that put this Niagara tributary on life support, rings familiar to polluted rivers and creeks all over the world. His work on the Scajaquada opened the door for a years-long, similarly framed project on the sacred Bagmati River in Nepal, resulting in a wide-ranging work that included Nepalese student art, a documentary video, and a book and gallery exhibition that used Rey’s artistic talents to make the scientific data and policy accessible to anyone.
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