react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Arranged to take up the entirety of the page, the delicate tendrils of seaweed specimens look as if they were fresh from the seawater of the Pacific Ocean they emerged from some 150 some years ago. Carefully laid out and adhered to paper, their colors are a gradient of reds and soft pinks. Looking closer, some of the delicate ends of the preserved plants are yellow. These striking pieces of unidentified marine algae were collected on the coast of California between 1875 and 1886 in an area called Mishopshno by the Chumash, and renamed Carpinteria by the Spanish in 1769. The preserved “sea moss,” as they were often called at the time, are part of a larger album created by Juliette Fish. Born in Iowa, Fish traveled with her family at the age of sixteen to the newly formed state of California via covered wagon in 1862. She began her practice of “seaweeding” around 1865. Fish gathered these marine plants on her family’s land on the beach in Carpinteria, which was later acquired by the state in the 1930s. Her albums are one example of materials, categorized outside of the “fine arts,” that records an aspect of local placemaking.