By Lookout Staff

March 19, 2026 -- Santa Monica will celebrate the "currency" of water with an art exhibition just a dash away from the world's largest and deepest ocean.

"Water is a Currency" will open with a reception on Saturday, April 4, from 1 to 3 p.m. and run through September 27 at the Annenberg Community Beach House.

The exhibition "explores the cultural, spiritual, and historical relationships between water, movement, and collective memory," said Cultural Affairs Supervisor Natalie Marrero.

The exhibit features sculpture, moving image and light-based works that consider diaspora -- "the dispersion of people from their original homeland."

The theme is viewed "not solely as a history of loss, but as a dynamic system of circulation through which knowledge, care, and cultural memory move across oceans and generations," Marrero said.

The artists featured in the exhibit include a member of the Pechanga Band of Indians who is a weaver and photographer, a "half-Japanese" artist who works in textiles and two multi-media artists -- a daughter of Filipino immigrants and a Puerto Rican raised on the island.

"Water serves as the exhibition’s central metaphor and archive: a living system that connects bodies, histories, and futures while reminding us of our shared material and ecological origins," Marrero said.

"Water is a Currency" is curated by Marrero and artist Laura Nieto. For more information and to view the artists' work, click here