Now these women and many others from around the world who have devoted their lives to protecting and advocating for water are on the third floor of Overture Center for a two-month run in the James Watrous Gallery.

They won’t be there in person, in a photograph or even a painting. Instead, they are depicted in the intricate and detailed weavings from the high-tech Jacquard loom of Mary Burns, who works out of her home studio along the Manitowish River just south of Mercer in far northern Wisconsin.

Visitors will be forgiven if they mistake Burns’ “Women and Water” exhibit for paintings. That’s how much detail is revealed in her work.

Burns uses her medium to tell the stories of remarkable women who have stepped forward, sometimes at great risk, to protect drinking water, lakes, rivers, marshes and aquifers.

“At this moment, water issues are so important and are on everybody’s radar,” Burns said last week by phone from Mercer. “These are women who really have worked to protect and advocate for water. Whether it’s activists, scientists or farmers in Mozambique, they are working to help the planet. There’s nothing more important than our water issues, and I think that’s resonating with people.”

Burns first displayed some of the weavings in spring 2022 at the five-day, International Freshwater Ecology Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, before they were shown for two months at the Center for the Visual Arts in Wausau. But the exhibit’s longest show was a five-month run this year at the Northern Great Lakes Visitor Center near Ashland, where more than 50,000 people took in Burns’ work.

The exhibit at Watrous Gallery opened Nov. 24 along with “Of Words and Trees,” an exhibit by Milwaukee artist Madeline Grace Martin, whose use of shapes, pinecones and paper pay tribute to her father, a writer, social worker and boxer who planted trees.

Both exhibits at the gallery, which can be accessed via elevator in the Overture Center Rotunda, will run through Feb. 4. Admission is free.

The gallery

The 1,400-square-foot gallery, named after a longtime art and history professor at UW-Madison, opened in 2004 and is operated by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. The organization’s work includes examining science and culture in Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine, exploring pathways to a sustainable future through its Climate and Energy Initiative, offering courses and public talks, and supporting the state’s poet laureate.

The Watrous Gallery is reserved for Wisconsin artists, and the competition to show one’s work is stiff. A call for artists is made every three to four years with a jury of five people selecting a wide range of art that represents “the full spectrum of what Wisconsin art is all about,” said Jody Clowes, the gallery’s director since 2010. In the most recent round, only 10% of the 245 artists who applied were accepted, which has the gallery scheduled out almost through 2028.

“It’s really exciting they all want to show here, but it’s also been really hard to have to send out so many rejection letters,” Clowes said.

The artist

Burns’ work stood out because it wasn’t about the artist, Clowes said. Burns has 39 weaved portraits, some portraying multiple women, but the gallery only had space for 27 of the framed pieces, most of which are 43 inches wide and 31 inches tall.

“She’s really honoring all of these individuals,” Clowes said. “She just dove into the research and was so impressed by the stories she found and she wanted to dedicate her work to that.”

If this story sounds familiar, you’re not mistaken.

In July 2022, I wrote about Burns after discovering her work in the home she shares with her husband, John Bates. I had traveled to Bayfield County to write about a new fish market operated by the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and followed that up with a stop in Saxon to meet Shane Wyzlic, who used some of his vacation time from the Social Security Administration to travel not once but twice to Ukraine to assist in humanitarian aid efforts.

The last stop was to meet with Bates, who had just completed “Wisconsin’s Wild Lakes,” a 241-page book about the last remaining undeveloped lakes in the state. But when I walked through the front door, I was immediately struck by the weavings that filled a wall. The $25,000 loom was on one end of the studio, and it took only a few minutes to decide that this was a pretty special story, too.

The project

Burns, 69, came up with the idea while doing another project that used her loom to create woven images that honored and profiled ancestral women from Wisconsin’s 12 Native American tribes. As she began to get to know the women, Burns became aware of “their reverence for water” and how women in their culture are “the keepers of the water,” she said.

“It’s giving voice to these women,” Burns said during a tour of her studio last summer. “And they’re just a small fraction of the women who are doing just amazing work.”

Burns, who began weaving in her days as a student at Wausau Newman High School, worked with the UW-Madison Trout Lake Limnology Station, which wrote the grant to get funding from the Wisconsin Arts Board. She began the weaving of “Women and Water” in 2017.

Other women featured in the exhibit include Tinker Schuman, an elder of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Vilas County who has led spiritual water walks around some of the reservation’s 260 lakes; Aunofo Havea Funaki, a sea captain and ocean steward in the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga; and Nafisa Barot, who has championed water issues in her home country of India.

All of the women in Burns’ weavings are now chronicled in a book that was published in June. The text was written by Bates. The exhibit fits the mission of the Academy of Sciences, which has long been advocating for healthy waters.

“Seeing these woman portrayed in the exhibit and then reading their stories is so moving that people, I’m hoping, are inspired to take action,” Burns said. “It’s been such a long journey and to have it to go to a place like the Watrous is really great.”