Walking in Antarctica Exhibition at Sioux City Public Museum

In 2015, artist Helen Glazer traveled to Antarctica as a grantee of the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, in order to photograph ice and geological formations for eventual production as photographic prints and sculpture. She worked out of remote Antarctic scientific field camps and had access to protected areas that can only be entered with government permits or in the company of a skilled mountaineer.

Inspired and informed by her experiences, Walking in Antarctica is an immersive,
interdisciplinary exhibition bringing together photography, sculpture, and audio narrative to
take the viewer on a journey through an extraordinary environment of remote places that the
tourist ships do not reach and few people get to witness in person. The exhibition is organized as a series of "walks" through remarkable Antarctic landscapes: over frozen lakes, around towering glaciers and baroque sea ice formations, into a magnificent frozen ice cave, across fields of surreal-looking boulders, and through a lively colony of nesting Adélie penguins. Visitors to the exhibition who have smartphones will be able to access an audio tour narrated by Glazer, drawn from a blog in which she recorded her experiences.

Through her artwork, Glazer strives to convey the wonder and complexity of the natural world
to others, in order to motivate a desire to protect and preserve wild places. Her study of earth
science over the past several years heightened her awareness of multiple factors shaping the land over time. In recognizing that complex patterns in nature express the particular physical forces at work, she became more attuned to the interplay between geology, climate, life forms, and human activity in a given location. Walking in Antarctica opens November 12 at the Sioux City Public Museum.

Exhibition: Walking in Antarctica
Host Organization: Sioux City Public Museum
Runs: November 12, 2025-March 9, 2026

The Sioux City Public Museum is located at 607 4th Street in downtown Sioux City. Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call 712-279-6174 or visit SiouxCityMuseum.org.

This project is organized by Mid-America Arts Alliance and is an adaptation of the artist's solo exhibition of the same title held at the Rosenberg Gallery at Goucher College (Baltimore, MD) that was funded in part by grants from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and the Puffin Foundation. Creation of this work was made possible in part by a Rubys Artist Project Grant, a program of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance conceived and initiated with funding from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and by a Puffin Foundation Artist Grant.