-
On June 8th, 2025 April Waters was elected to the Explorers Club in recognition of valuable contributions to exploration and scientific achievement under the United States Antarctic Program.
Over the past 121 years, the Explorers Club has dedicated itself to the advancement of field research, scientific exploration, resource conservation, and the idea that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore.
She recently returned from a visit to New York and the club. During the Heroic Age of Exploration, her great-great uncle, Alfred Harrison, explored the Arctic and lived with the Inuit (1905 to 1907). He published a book called In Search of a Polar Continent.
Top photo:
April Waters in the Explorers Club with the historical portrait of Peter Freuchen, Greenlandic explorer.
Lower Photo:
Waters with Olivia Dodd, archivist at the Explorers Club NYC. Holding the book from their library “In Search of a Polar Continent” by Waters’ great-great uncle, Alfred Harrison.
-
Oil on canvas, 28 by 98 inches
2025
This recent commissioned painting is the latest of a series on the Willamette River.
The Willamette flows north through northwestern Oregon into the Columbia River on the Oregon/Washington border. Its valley was sculpted by the Missoula Floods at the end of the last ice age and over time, it has been altered by countless floods and farmers. The painting was commissioned by a family whose members have been farming the area for over 200 years.
“Willamette” is believed to derive from the colonized pronunciation of the Kalapuyan word, Wallamt, which means “still water”.
-
Salem on the Edge Art Gallery
March 3rd - March 31st 2025
Downtown Salem @ 156 Liberty St NE
-
Cannon Gallery
Western Oregon University
January 13th - March 21st, 2025
Open Monday - Friday, 8 am - 5 pm
-
August 9 - 14, 2024
-
October 2023 - April 16, 2024
National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado
Water-Ice-Sky, Antarctica, an exhibition by artist April Waters, is on display at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, from October 9, 2023, to April 29, 2024. As a grantee of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, April traveled in 2018 to Palmer Station on the Antarctic Peninsula. There, she observed, photographed, and sketched the glaciers, icebergs, ocean, sky, and wildlife. She joined scientists who were collecting samples from boats on the Southern Ocean and witnessed the effects of climate change firsthand in this rapidly warming region of Antarctica.
Throughout her career, April has depicted water in her paintings - Oregon’s Willamette River and Crater Lake, for example. The visit to Antarctica helped her expand that focus to include another form of water: ice. Water is impermanent, says April. It’s always moving through the water cycle. And the Antarctic ice she documented is melting rapidly because of climate change. With her paintings, she is capturing water and ice in a particular place and time.
“The paintings of our polar ice are expressions of a beautiful, fascinating, life-giving, and ever-changing substance. They are portraits of chapters in the life of water.”
- April Waters
She brought her observations, sketches, and photographs back to her studio – including sketches of the colors, patterns, and shapes she saw in the ice – and created landscape paintings of the Earth’s southernmost continent, focusing on the three most prominent features of the place: ice, ocean, and sky. Fine art prints of her landscape paintings and a suite of photographs that tell her story of the Antarctic are on display at NCAR.
Dr. Kim Bernard (left), April Waters (right)
-
March 15 - April 28, 2023
Giustina Gallery Oregon State University
CORVALLIS, Ore. – An Oregon State University gallery is holding a water-themed art show from March 15 to April 28 that includes paintings from a Salem-based painter who traveled to Antarctica to document the changing landscape and has strong ties to an Oregon State scientist who studies the continent.
“It’s the Water: An Exhibition of Painting and Photography by Seven Artists” includes work by April Waters, who in 2018 spent several weeks in Antarctica drawing inspiration for the paintings on display. Six other Oregon artists are also featured.
The work is being exhibited at the Giustina Gallery at The LaSells Stewart Center, 875 SW 26th St., Corvallis. It’s free to visit the gallery, which is open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and evenings and weekends when events are scheduled. An exhibition reception will be held from 3 to 6 p.m. April 8. It is also free to attend and open to the public.
Waters traveled to the Southern Ocean and West Antarctic Peninsula as part of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. (That program is now known as Polar STEAM and led by Oregon State and funded by the NSF.)
Prior to her trip, Waters communicated with Kim Bernard, an associate professor in Oregon State’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences who studies how climate change is impacting Antarctic krill, which support populations of whales, seals, seabirds and penguins.
Bernard, whose research in Antarctica is noted in the exhibit, and Waters spoke about Bernard’s personal experiences with climate change at Palmer Station, the Antarctic research station where Waters spent her residency. Bernard also assisted Waters in identifying the geographic features (islands and mountains) depicted in Waters’ paintings. Since 2000, Bernard has made 16 expeditions to Antarctica and spent 36 months at Palmer Station.
Waters is exhibiting five paintings drawn from what she saw in Antarctica and one from an artist residency she did in Greenland. They depict the ocean, icebergs and glaciers, with one being as large as 7 feet by 9 feet and another that is more than 17 feet long.
The exhibition also includes black and white photographs from Rich Bergeman; acrylic paintings by Rebecca Kiser; aerial photographs from Duncan Berry; color photographs from Jeremy Burke; watercolor paintings by Gary Buhler; and oil paintings from Katia Kyte.
-
May 7 – August 13, 2022
Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR
In 2018, Salem, Oregon, artist April Waters — known for her works that focus on water and contemporary women leaders — turned her attention to Antarctica. As a grantee of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program to observe, study, photograph, and sketch the ocean, icebergs, and Marr Glacier.
After witnessing firsthand the beauty and harsh realities of a landscape facing monumental change, coupled with profound implications for the entire globe, Waters returned to her studio to transform her sketches, photographs and experiences into paintings of the earth’s southernmost continent.“As Antarctica is undergoing dramatic changes in response to climate change,” marine biologist Dr. Kim Bernard of Oregon State University says, “I hope that those who experience the paintings that April Waters has created from her Antarctic expedition feel awed and inspired to protect this place.”The exhibition features a range of Antarctica paintings created over the past three years as well as text panels and ephemera that describe her journey and the science being done at Palmer Station, and includes a full-color brochure with an essay by art writer Bob Hicks.Later this summer Waters will embark on the next part of her journey to further explore the story of melting ice and climate change by traveling to the opposite end of the globe to Ilulissat Art Museum in west Greenland. There she will travel by boat in Disko Bay and fly over the Jakobshavn and Equi Glaciers, to witness Greenland’s stunning and quickly melting ice.Waters has a Bachelor of Fine Art from University of Colorado, in Boulder, and worked for many years as a registered nurse. Her paintings can be found in the collections of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Oregon State University, Mount Angel Library, as well as many places of healing. Her painting "Wizard Island, Crater Lake," was exhibited at the American Embassy in Kyrgyzstan through the United States Arts in Embassies Program. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions over the past thirty years, including a one person show in the office of Oregon’s Governor.
-
Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR.September 18 to Dec 18, 2021.
The Hallie Ford Museum of Art opened a new exhibition titled “Time in Place: Northwest Art from the Permanent Collection.” Organized by Jonathan Bucci, the John Olbrantz Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, the exhibition considers how place can be seen in different ways, by different people, and at different times. The exhibition continues through December 18, 2021, in the Melvin Henderson-Rubio Gallery.
The exhibition explores the concept of place in the Northwest through the lens of time. It poses questions about the relationship between place and time and asks visitors to consider such questions as how does place change over time? How do artists respond to a specific place shift? How do personal experiences affect one’s relationship to a region or place? And finally, how does knowledge of history impact depictions of place?
The exhibition features a number of works from the Hallie Ford Museum of Art’s permanent collection that have never been exhibited before, including the remnants of a sandal from Fort Rock in Eastern Oregon that is more than 9,000 years old, as well as a mural of the Willamette Valley that was painted by the late Carl Hall for the Rowell home in the Fairmont neighborhood in Salem before it was removed a number of years ago and donated to the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.
In addition to Carl Hall, the exhibition features work by some of the foremost artists of our region, including Michael Brophy, James Castle, Joe Feddersen (Colville), Charles Heaney, DE May, Robert McCauley, Tom Prochaska, April Waters, and Marie Watt (Seneca), among many others.
-
By Bob Hicks
The view to the west out the expansive windows in April Waters’ studio is a rolling landscape of woods, farmlands, habitations and foothills stepping up toward the Coast Range. Against one wall a giant bare canvas stretches 72 by 108 inches, almost as wide as and considerably longer than a king size bed. A commissioned portrait in process is visible, and several giclee prints of her landscape paintings are slotted in a folding stand. As the sun moves across the studio, which is built on a hillside to the south of downtown Salem, her easel rolls with it, catching the light the way she likes it.
The vista is rich and fertile, vastly different from the edge of Antarctica, where she’ll travel in November to take part in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. The NSF program places artists in one of three United States Antarctic research stations to observe the world at its extremes, and help explain through their art the significance of the life and landscape of the southernmost continent and what changes there mean to the world as a whole. Both the Willamette Valley vistas that Waters paints and the Antarctic ice shores she is about to visit are places intimately involved in the shifts and balances and warning signs of climate change.
The land below Waters’ studio windows is fed and replenished and constantly reinvented by water and the way it rises, falls and flows. Those fluctuations – what she calls water’s “qualities of reflection, transparency, movement and life generation” – are central to much of her work. What might seem at first glance simply a well-rendered landscape is certainly that, but also more: It is an examination of waterways, their shifting patterns, their effect on humans and the way we live our lives, the precarious ecological balances of a world in climate upheaval. There is something, not clinical, but deeply observational about her interpretations of the natural world and the way things work. “As Sylvia Earle says, with every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you are connected to the sea,” Waters comments, quoting the marine biologist whose large-scale portrait she has painted. “She says with knowing there is caring and with caring there is hope.”
April Waters (left), Dr. Vandana Shiva (right)
-
A. N. Bush Gallery, Salem, OR. Sept-Nov 2016
Women Reshaping the World Conference, Portland, OR. May 2012
Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR. March 2011
Willamette University, Salem, OR. Feb-May 2010
“A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” - Joseph Campbell
This series of paintings consists of eight large-scale portraits of larger-than-life women. Vandana Shiva, Wangari Maathai, Malalai Joya, Helen Caldicott, Amy Goodman, Cindy Sheehan, Maude Barlow and Dr. Sylvia Earle are women who have bravely raised the flame for humanitarian and environmental justice. They have taken a stand to protect people and/or resources. Most of the women have made contributions to the equitable sharing and protection of water.
Over a six-year period, April Waters traveled throughout the US to meet each woman. Friends of the artist who traveled to India, Africa, and Afghanistan brought back stories and images that were woven into these works.
Like strong rivers that converge and flow together to bring life to the world, these women move our world toward greater justice, peace, and a more equitable sharing of nature's resources.