Prairie Rivers Network is a leading voice for clean water and healthy rivers, doing crucial policy work across Illinois.
Robert Hirschfeld leads PRN’s efforts to ensure and protect water quality, water quantity, water access, and water equity for all of Illinois. He advocates and speaks for clean water, river protection, biological integrity, wildlife conservation, and climate mitigation and adaptation. Through collaboration with local, regional, state and national partners, he pursues policies, programs, and strategies that will ensure the long-term health and beauty of Illinois’ communities, rivers, and habitat. He also works on many of PRN’s communications and social media campaigns, and he produces videos and podcasts.
Robert’s lecture accompanies a beautiful show in the gallery:
Watershed Cairns: : Marking the Mississippi River Watershed
Libby Reuter (sculptor) and Joshua Rowan (photographer)
Opening : October 3, 2pm-9pm
talk by Libby Reuter at 6pm, followed by a reception
Regular hours: Saturdays, 2pm – 7pm, or by appointment during the week
Where does your water go? Watershed Cairns artists—sculptor Libby Reuter and photographer Joshua Rowan—have spent fifteen years asking that question in the Mississippi River Watershed. Driving on gravel roads next to the rivers in a van full of repurposed glass, they stop every 30 to 50 miles. There, Reuter assembles a site-specific glass cairn sculpture, inspired by the stones that hikers stack to mark a significant place. Then, Rowan captures light and landscape in a photograph, and the cairn is repacked before they move to the next site. In this way, they have marked over four-hundred-fifty places where fresh water meets the land on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. Four hundred pins on the watershedcairns.com interactive map mark the exact location where each cairn was photographed and highlight the interconnected river system providing drinking water and irrigation for 41 percent of the continental United States.
A few of Watershed Cairns’ luminous large-scale photographs from the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and Arkansas Rivers and glass cairn sculptures will be on exhibit Watershed Art and Ecology during October 2026.
The Artists
Libby Reuter is a sculptor, public artist, and water advocate based in Alton, Illinois. She was associate dean at Washington University School of Art (now the Sam Fox School of Design and Art) in St. Louis, Missouri. Then she served as executive director/curator of the William and Florence Schmidt Art Center at Southwestern Illinois College, in Belleville, Illinois until her retirement.
Joshua Rowan is a landscape photographer, illustrator, painter, and co-publisher of Black Dagger Books, Spire and Scribe, and Luminus Books, featuring the fine art work by international tattoo and figurative artists. He lives in rural Southern Illinois. A one-person exhibit of his paintings was held at the Hise Museum at Southeastern Illinois College, Harrisburg, Illinois in 2026.
Reuter and Rowan began Watershed Cairns in 2011. The work has been exhibited at the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; the Minnesota Marine Arts Museum, Winona, Minnesota; the National Great Rivers Museum, Alton, Illinois; the Dubuque (Iowa) Museum of Art; and numerous St. Louis area galleries.