January 6 – 30, 2026 – Sheen Center for Thought and Culture – Janet Hennessey Dilenschneider Gallery, 18 Bleecker Street, New York, NY
Gallery Reception January 7 at 5 pm
Think About Water member Leslie Sobel ventures to 82 degrees north to witness water’s most vulnerable transformation. Arctic Reverie is a solo exhibition of paintings from Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago changing faster than anywhere on Earth.
In August 2024, Sobel traveled aboard the polar vessel Ortelius, circumnavigating Svalbard on her second Arctic artist residency. What she documented is climate change made visible—retreating glaciers, polar bears hunting reindeer instead of seals as ice floes disappear, rain and mud where there should be frozen terrain. The work merges abstraction with representation, composed to echo religious icons, honoring what she describes as “something ineffable and sacred about the high latitudes and the power and fragility of the environs and its inhabitants.”
This is art as advocacy. Sobel’s paintings hold space for wonder and grief simultaneously, bearing witness to ecosystems at the precipice of irreversible change. Water in its frozen form defines the Arctic—the ice sustaining food webs, the permafrost holding millennia of carbon, the glaciers regulating global systems. Through experimental approaches to painting, Sobel translates scientific urgency into emotional resonance.
At Think About Water, we believe artists play an essential role in making the climate crisis tangible. Sobel’s work does exactly this—capturing the beauty of a place while mourning its loss, inviting us all to become witnesses to one of the planet’s most critical water stories.