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. Since 1992, Colbert has undertaken more than 40 expeditions to India, Egypt, Namibia, Borneo and other locations around the globe to capture 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 uses sustainable bamboo as the primary structural element. When built, the 5,100-square-metre Nomadic Museum in Mexico City’s Zócalo was the largest bamboo structure ever erected.
Ashes and Snow continues its global migration with further venues planned in Latin America, Asia and Europe. To date, more than nine and a half million people around the world have attended the exhibition.
