POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar has collaborated with artist and researcher, Sa’dia Rehman on a new exhibition, Water/Bodies:Sa’dia Rehman, the centerpiece of which is a massive site-responsive wall drawing that engages critically with Vassar’s founding collection of Hudson River School art. Breaking with these nineteenth-century paintings’ idealized pastoral representations, Rehman’s drawing makes visible latent themes of empire, religion, and Manifest Destiny that undergird the Hudson Valley, as well as global histories of dam-induced displacement of water and people.
“One of many remarkable things about Sa’dia’s work is their use of nontraditional materials, and how these connect to and advance their ideas and research. Materials like rebar, clay on burlap, repurposed cardboard boxes, gauze, books, and water itself,” said the Loeb’s Azra Dawood, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs, who organized the exhibition. “The ephemeral nature of these substances and objects—for example, the clay in the wall drawing that may gradually fall or the rebar in a sculpture that is rusting over time—speaks to Sa’dia’s attention to fragility and displacement, and their interest in working with architectural and memory fragments. Perhaps they also indicate the unreliability, and hopefully the cracking, of canonical histories.”
The wall drawing, with dimensions spanning approximately 15 ft tall and 18 ft wide, is in dialogue with other multimedia works also by Rehman, folding architectural and memory fragments with imagination and scientific data. Across this body of work, the artist pulls from their travel, archival research, and dialogues with family members, communities, scientists and environmentalists to ultimately perform an act of “re-surfacing,” in which disregarded histories of people, flora, and fauna rise again to repair and reform canonical histories and heroic narratives of water management.
“My wall drawing at the Loeb Art Center explores the sublime and the sacrifice, which evoke the ecosystem of Hudson River School’s paintings and current themes of my own work regarding empire and labor,” said Rehman. “I am also thinking of the words extinction and erasure as material. Extinction is defined as having no living member or no longer in existence. And in erasure there is still hope in a remnant or a visible layer of knowing of what once lived. The wall drawing extends three-dimensionally from the wall, creating an architectural narrative of loss, of resiliency and endurance.”
“We are very excited to be working with Sa'dia Rehman on this exhibition, which will greatly enhance our efforts to recontextualize the Hudson River School paintings in the collection,” said Bart Thurber, the Anne Hendricks Bass Director of the Loeb.
Sa’dia Rehman’s work surfaces the histories of power and displacement concealed within water bodies. If seen primarily as a commodity or landscape feature, water—aided by the human, geographic, and institutional bodies that attempt to control it—hides its complexity. Yet, across its different behaviors and forms, water is central to our lives. It indelibly constructs our physical, personal, and political landscapes. Rehman draws out the stories of these landscapes by paying attention to water’s material nature, and to its varying relationships to land (flooding, draining out of, contained within).
Rehman’s practice springs from the history of the Indus River, a body of water flowing through Tibet, Kashmir, and Pakistan. It particularly engages with the cultural and environmental costs of dam construction, a focus that has emerged from their family’s history. The construction of the Tarbela Dam on the Indus displaced the artist’s family from their lands in the 1970s. More recently, Rehman’s focus has expanded to global sites, such as the Balearic Sea, California Mission Dams, and the Bagmati and Hudson Rivers.
Water/Bodies: Sa’dia Rehman is a two-part exhibition. Part One opened on February 22, 2025 and on April 15, 2025, the exhibition will expand to a second gallery. The show is in conversation with two other Loeb exhibitions, Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues (February 15–August 17, 2025) and Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Black Space-Making from Harlem to the Hudson Valley (February 8–August 17, 2025). Together, the three will kickstart a Loeb initiative to reinterpret and reinstall the museum’s collection of art from the Hudson River School.
“On view concurrently in adjacent galleries, Water/Bodies and Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues differ in format and approach, yet they complement each other in concept and theme,” said Mary-Kay Lombino, Deputy Director and the Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator of the Loeb. “Each exhibition presents artist responses to the relationship between the urban and the rural, industrialization and environmental preservation, and the effects of that exchange across time and space.”
