Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts shows Beth Maynor Young

Written by Gregory Swindell Tuesday, 17 May 2011 20:40

Montgomery, AL - In celebration of the Year of Alabama Arts declared by the Alabama Bureau of Tourism, the Museum features Alabama Imagery , a series of photography exhibitions focusing on Alabama people, places, and events by artists who were born, raised, or worked in Alabama. The third exhibition in this celebratory series of photography, Beth Maynor Young: Rivers Run Through It, is on display through July 8, 2007.

Beth Maynor Young’s subjects are swamps and bluffs, swift creeks and lazy rivers, rocky shoals and misty mornings; her cause is protecting waters threatened by pollution and suburban sprawl. She works throughout the southeast, but concentrates in Alabama, whose 77,000 miles of rivers and streams (more than 43 other states) are home to the widest variety of freshwater fish in the nation.

Young captures the beauty of the natural condition of her native state. Like Ansel Adams, the photographer/environmentalist whose hauntingly beautiful black and white photos of Yosemite and other western scenery have become iconic images of America’s wild places, she shows the inherent value of rocks and rills that many Alabamians never see. Her color close-ups, wide-angle and telephoto views in this exhibition range from the broad Tennessee River and spectacular Pisgah Falls in the north to the sandy shores of the Perdido River, our eastern border with Florida.

All of the pictures in the exhibition were made in Alabama revealing “Alabama the Beautiful,” as a recent state tourism promotion put it, and they tacitly advocate wise stewardship of our watersheds, natural resources with great economic as well as aesthetic value.

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Sunday Noon to 5p.m. Admission is free and donations are welcome. For more information, call the MMFA at 334.240.4333 or visit the website at www.mmfa.org