Guest Speaker: Megan Prelinger
7pm, Monday April 18th, 2016
FREE Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco, CA
In 2010, Megan Prelinger and collaborators Rick Prelinger and Stacy Kozakavich were invited by the Exploratorium to develop exhibits for the Museum’s planned Bay Observatory gallery. The Bay Observatory opened to the public in 2013, featuring dozens of research-based exhibits that combine the Museum’s legacy imperative to integrate art and science for the benefit of public understanding with a fresh imperative to explore the waterfront and the natural environment. In response to the Exploratorium’s prompt to “animate the Library in the service of understanding San Francisco Bay,” Megan and her collaborators created a series of graphic atlases that explain that histories of the watersheds and the shorelines, both natural history and the built environment. Watersheds and Shorelines are two of five atlases that also include Islands and the two urban atlases, San Francisco and East Bay. All are installed as permanent exhibits in the Bay Observatory, along with a public access mini library of Bay Area landscape history. In her April 18 presentation, Megan will show slides and discuss the research and outcomes behind the Watersheds atlas and the Shorelines atlas. Watersheds traces the flow of water from the mountains to the mouth of the Bay, and Shorelines traces the landscape of the water’s edge of both San Pablo Bay and San Francisco Bay.
Megan Prelinger is a cultural historian and naturalist. She is co-founder along with Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Library and architect of its information design. The library is an independent landscape-based research library in San Francisco that has been open to the public since 2004. She is the author of several books, most recently Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (W.W. Norton, 2015), and the 2013 and 2014 Watersheds, Shorelines, and Islands historical atlases, all permanent exhibits in the Exploratorium’s Bay Observatory gallery.
