ashes and snow
Rolex’s patronage programme extends support to individual artists, helping them make significant offerings to the world. This includes Canadian artist Gregory Colbert and his master achievement Ashes and Snow – an installation of large-scale photographic artworks and films housed in the Nomadic Museum. Since 1992, Colbert has undertaken more than 60 expeditions to India, Egypt, Namibia, Borneo and other locations around the globe an filmed over 130 species, capturing extraordinary moments of contact between man and nature.
Gregory Colbert originally conceived of the idea for a sustainable travelling museum in 1999. The first public installation of Ashes and Snow, which opened in 2002 at the Arsenale in Venice, inspired the architectural concepts used in the Nomadic Museum, the permanent travelling home of the exhibition.
The first Nomadic Museum made its debut with the opening of Ashes and Snow in New York City and subsequently migrated with the exhibition to Santa Monica, California; Tokyo, Japan and Mexico City. The most recent design of the Nomadic Museum used sustainable bamboo as the primary structural element. When built, the 5,100-square-metre building, located in Mexico City’s Zócalo was the largest bamboo structure ever erected.
Ashes and Snow at the Nomadic Museum will reopen in Brazil in early 2009. Further venues are planned in Latin America, Asia and Europe. To date, more than nine and a half million people around the world have attended the exhibition, making it the most visited exhibition by a living artist in history.
