The Crisp-Ellert Art Museum has spent this entire fall on water, which is not a theme anybody announced, and the easiest way to see it is to lay the three programs in a row: an exhibition about a river that was straightened, a residency by a biologist who works on what lives in rivers, and on Tuesday a documentary about the one river in this state that everybody has agreed to call a river of grass since 1947. The film is the part a reader can still get to, and it is free.

River of Grass screens Tuesday, Oct. 13 from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in the Gamache-Koger Theater, in the Ringhaver Student Center at 50 Sevilla Street. It runs 83 minutes, it was finished in 2025, and Sasha Wortzel directed it. Afterward Wortzel takes questions, moderated by Anne Schindler, who hosts First Coast Connect on WJCT.

The museum’s announcement says the event is free and open to the public, and then says seating is limited and every attendee must RSVP, which are two sentences that have to be read together. It is presented with Flagler College’s Lifelong Learning Institute and the St. Augustine Film Society.

Wortzel is not a stranger to the building, having been an artist-in-residence at Crisp-Ellert in 2021 and come back in 2022 with an exhibition called Dreams of Unknown Islands, which means the museum booked a filmmaker it had already housed twice before her first feature won anything.

What the film is reworking

The book is Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s The Everglades: River of Grass, published in 1947, and the museum’s own description of what that book did is the useful part: it changed the public understanding of the Everglades from worthless swamp to an essential source of fresh water. Wortzel’s film travels the Everglades after a hurricane with Betty Osceola, an educator with the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, and sets Douglas’s writing against present-day footage and archive, which the release says has taken the Pare Lorentz Award from the International Documentary Association, a special jury prize at Hot Docs and the Mead Audience Award. Seventy-eight years between the book and the film is a long time for an argument to stay open, and the reason it is open is that the thing the book was arguing about is still being plumbed.

The exhibition closes Nov. 7

Rebel Waters / Aguas Rebeldes, by Nicole Antebi, has been up at the museum at 48 Sevilla Street since Aug. 31 and comes down Saturday, Nov. 7, which leaves four weeks. Antebi grew up between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez and the work is about the Rio Grande, or the Rio Bravo depending on which bank you are standing on, back when it still meandered, and about the Santa Cruz River. She works in sculpture and animation, and the materials are the kind of detail that tells you what the show actually is: found cottonwood out of the San Rafael Valley in Arizona, and papel de amate, which is Jonote bark paper from northern Puebla. She teaches illustration and animation at the University of Arizona and took a MacDowell Fellowship last year.

Between the exhibition and the film the museum ran a two-week residency, Sept. 7 to Sept. 19, for Dr. Brandon Ballengee, whose public workshop was titled Fishes: Masters of Adaptation. A river straightened, the fish in it, and the water a state decided to drain: three bookings, one subject, and nowhere on the museum’s pages does it say so.

Who paid for it

The museum states its own funding in one sentence, and the sentence names three sources: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the JoAnn Crisp-Ellert Fund at the Community Foundation for Northeast Florida, and the St. Johns County Tourist Development Council. The third of those is public money, collected on hotel rooms in this county and appropriated by a county board, and the museum attaches no figure to any of the three and gives no year in which any of them ends, so what a reader can know from the page is who and not how much.

Admission is free, including special events unless the museum says otherwise, which the Visit page states plainly. What that page does not state is when the museum is open.

The only hours it published, as of Tuesday night, cover May 15 to June 25, Monday through Friday from 10 to 4 and closed Saturdays, with July and August closed. There are no autumn hours on it, in October. The museum takes questions at ceam@flagler.edu, and the accessibility contact is Phil Pownall at 904-819-6460.

The film is Tuesday at 6. The exhibition is down on the 7th.