A transdisciplinary project focusing on water justice advocacy efforts on the Santa Cruz watershed, especially in the Southside, home to the Tucson International Airport Superfund site where historic remediation efforts treat the groundwater for TCE, 1, 4 Dioxane, & PFAS, before discharge currently into the aquifer and river.
Groundwater II connects research faculty and students from shared colleges to campus and community partners to collaboratively create and enact work from a set of briefs that make use of the tools of spatial visualization, interpretation, and visual storytelling. Groundwater II is one of six Arts +Resilience projects funded by a partnership between UArizona College of Fine Arts (CFA) and the Arizona Institute of Resilience (AIR). This project site provides an overview and archive of completed and upcoming engagements, projects and presentations related to this research.
Lead Community Consultant: Yolanda Herrera, Community Co-Chair, Unified Community Advisory Board (UCAB).
Artist-in-Residence: Jessica Wolff
Student Research Assistants: Alexis Hagestad (Graduate), Jasmine Lopez (Undergraduate), Sarah Snyder (Undergraduate)
Linked Courses: ART 343A: Traditional Photographic Techniques (Spring 2025), PAH 420: Innovation and the Human Condition - Southside Stories of Environmental Resilience (Multiple semesters)
Groundwater II is one of six Arts +Resilience projects funded by a partnership between UArizona College of Fine Arts (CFA) and the Arizona Institute of Resilience (AIR). The project team acknowledges its partners especially from Department of Public and Applied Humanities (PAH), UArizona Libraries (UAL) Special Collections & CATalyst Studio; College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (CAPLA), Center for Creative Photography, College of FIne Arts (CFA), Arizona Institute of Resilience (AIR) as well as Sunnyside Foundation, Office of Congressman Raúl Grijalva, the Unified Community Advisory Board (UCAB), Tucson Water, Frank de la Cruz Library, the El Pueblo Senior Center, City of Tucson Parks and Recreation, with special thanks to the offices of Pima County Supervisor Adelita Grijalva & Tucson Council Member Lane Santa Cruz, and the reviewers, speakers, site-/archive- visit experts and consultants who supported our students and research.
Ground/Water II: Overview Arts and CultureResearch Jacqueline Barrios (College of Humanities) and Martina Shenal (School of Art)
This project overview provides a brief summary of Ground/Water II: Water Advocacy on the Santa Cruz River, a transdisciplinary project that engages research faculty from Public & Applied Humanities and the School of Art as Co-PI’s, alongside community stakeholders, students, and representatives from Tucson’s water advocacy initiatives.
…Arts research [is] the creation of an image, object, text, performance, installation, experience, and/or proposition which enables alternative ways of knowing, understanding, and interacting with the subject or situation at hand.
—Ellen McMahon
Ground/Water II: Water Advocacy on the Santa Cruz RiverWaterfalls on the Santa Cruz River in 1889 near Sentinel Peak in Tucson. (Arizona Historical Society)
Waterfalls on the Santa Cruz River in 1889 near Sentinel Peak in Tucson. (Arizona Historical Society)
Collage of images of outfalls from Tucson Water’s Santa Cruz River Heritage project straddle a shot of the UV trains treating contaminated groundwater at Tucson Airport Remediation Project (TARP) facility. (Jacqueline Barrios)
Ground/Water II: Water Advocacy on the Santa Cruz River is a transdisciplinary project that engages research faculty from Public & Applied Humanities and the School of Art as Co-PI’s, alongside community stakeholders, students, and representatives from Tucson’s water advocacy initiatives.
With community and campus experts, undergraduate and graduate researchers, and a local artist-in-residence, this project collaboratively creates and executes a set of briefs that use the tools of spatial visualization, interpretation, and visual storytelling, to design publicly engaged courses, partnerships and projects that intervene, complement, document and amplify the community’s historic struggle to care for water and the environment.
ART 343A student print of the Santa Cruz River. (Maddox Muench)
Effluent - Dependent Reaches of the Santa Cruz River (Sonoran Institute)
Santa Cruz River Heritage Project (Tucson Water)
In 2024, American Rivers added the river to the list of the most endangered rivers in the US list, calling on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help establish an Urban National Wildlife Refuge to ensure this river remains a vital, protected area for ongoing remediation efforts. Climate aridification and a century of overuse had largely depleted the aquifer of groundwater and dried up the Santa Cruz River. Further rollbacks to clean water protections at the federal level could add new challenges to the health of the watershed longer term.
Selections from Jane Kay’s Arizona Daily Star May 1985 coverage of the TCE story. Courtesy, Arizona Daily Star.
Selections from Jane Kay’s Arizona Daily Star May 1985 coverage of the TCE story. Courtesy, Arizona Daily Star.
Image of Hughes Aircraft Lagoons (US Environmental Protection Agency EPA)
Tucson International Airport Authority (TIAA) Superfund Site Maps (Disabled Ecologies, Sunaura Taylor)
Tucson International Airport Authority (TIAA) Superfund Site Maps (Disabled Ecologies, Sunaura Taylor)
Tucson Airport Remediation Project (TARP) Water Treatment Facilities (Tucson Water)
Tucson Airport Remediation Project (TARP) Water Treatment Facilities (Tucson Water)
TIAA Superfund Site Plume and Diagrams (Tucson Water)
TARP aquifer diagram (Tucson Water)
Recent Tucson headlines on PFAS clean-up (Guardian)
Recent Tucson headlines on PFAS clean-up (Arizona Republic)
A key focus of Groundwater II is the spotlighting of water justice advocacy efforts in the Southside in close proximity to the Tucson International Airport Superfund site, focusing on remediation efforts, impacts and implications from discharging treated water, including TCE and 1,4 Dioxane, back into the Santa Cruz watershed. Our aim in this regard is to respectfully and critically make sensible this invisible and highly technical management of contamination and remediation, so that the imagination can be brought into the effort of building community resilience.
Research began in the winter of 2024 with visits to the Tucson Airport Remediation Project (TARP) treatment facility and the adjacent Irvington Outfall, to reflect on this intimacy between infrastructures of contamination, remediation and aquifer recharge. In Spring of 2025, a panel of Southside community leaders and researchers personally connected with our group at the El Pueblo Center, giving first-hand accounts of the journey then and now to fight for clean, and safe, water. Meanwhile, archivists at Special Collections and the Center for Creative Photography curated primary sources to support our study, culling materials from Eugene Smith’s Minamata Project to original studies and maps of the historic groundwater contamination in the Tucson International Airport area. A collaborative arts research field trip to the Santa Cruz River Park at Cushing & Frontage Road brought our classes together in the field, using photography, sketching, rubbings and other methods to record traces of their experience of the Santa Cruz River and the larger Tucson water ecosystem.
To culminate the project’s first phase, a shared review in the Spring of 2025 presented prints from Professor Shenal’s Art class, while Professor Barrios’ students presented prototypes of publicly-engagement projects inspired by or uplifting Southside stories of water justice advocacy. Forthcoming projects directed by our artist-in-residence, Jessica Wolff will include original art work as well as a zine publication based on our collaboration using a newsprint format to reference the seminal moment of Arizona Daily Star reporter Jane Kay’s breaking the TCE story in 1985. Additionally, ongoing public engagements and pedagogy are planned to further disseminate this work including a community co-curated segment as part of the the exhibition, El Pueblo 50, and a future Public and Applied Humanities (PAH) 420 course focusing on collecting immersive stories of places, memory and speculation through a “thick-map” of the Superfund site.
The long-term goal of this project is to work alongside the robust community of interdisciplinary activists, researchers, cultural workers, environmentalists, public servants and more who have long advocated for the Santa Cruz River, historically to the present. In particular, Groundwater II aims to create a companion book, a sequel to the interdisciplinary project on Rillito River, Ground|Water: The Art, Design and Science of a Dry River by Ellen McMahon, Beth Weinstein and Ander Monson (UA Press), to highlight the contributions these new interdisciplinary research projects contribute to the overall vision of a more resilient Santa Cruz RART 343A student contact sheets from collaborative field trip to the Santa Cruz River, March 2025. (Martina Shenal)ART 343A student print of the Santa Cruz River. (Katie Dusza) ART 343A student print of the Santa Cruz River. (Aidan Gravelle) ART 343A student print of the Santa Cruz River. (Renee Markovich)ART 343A student print of the Santa Cruz River. (Katie Dusza)ART 343A student print of the Santa Cruz River. (Katie Dusza)Psychology major and art minor Maddux Muench’s 6 x 17cm 3D-printed panorama camera images that show how his working methodology in the field is reminiscent of an archaeologist or geologist. (Maddux Muench) Psychology major and art minor Maddux Muench’s 6 x 17cm 3D-printed panorama camera images that show how his working methodology in the field is reminiscent of an archaeologist or geologist. (Maddux Muench
Some preliminary “findings” of the work can be seen in this selection of works from the collaborative field trip to the Santa Cruz River. The use of contact sheets from ART 343 students’ rolls of film, as well as selected prints. Shenal especially envisioned the contact sheet as a mapping devices that function as a window into the photographers’ movements and perspective in and on the river. Each student wrote reflections, interpretations, speculative observations and questions about their experience that informed their continuing work on their photographic series in the larger watershed.
“Possibility, perspective, presence in absence, deception, dreaming, and duality are the emergent concepts in these images. I thought about how within or beneath everything is its opposite, and I wanted to explore the possibility of seeing by the absence of an object or body- in this case a body of water.” -ART 343 student, Creative Writing Major, Art Minor
“A river of contrasts, in stretches where treated effluent keeps it flowing, the Santa Cruz river is both a lifeline and a paradox- a ‘living’ river sustained through human intervention. Much of the Santa Cruz River flow is now subsurface due to groundwater depletion. Are we nurturing an invisible river, or is it slipping away unnoticed?” - ART 343A student PAH 420 student polaroids from collaborative field trip to the Santa Cruz River, March 2025. (Martina Shenal)Recreational equestrian riders at the Santa Cruz River bed, students conducting fieldwork in the dry riverbed. Photographs produced at the Cushing/Frontage road section of the river during collaborative field trip to the Santa Cruz River, March 2025. (Kenny Wong)
Recreational equestrian riders at the Santa Cruz River bed, students conducting fieldwork in the dry riverbed. Photographs produced at the Cushing/Frontage road section of the river during collaborative field trip to the Santa Cruz River, March 2025. (Kenny Wong) Rubbings of the Santa Cruz River bed at Cushing & Frontage (Martina Shenal)
Rubbings of the Santa Cruz River bed at Cushing & Frontage (Jacqueline Barrios)
Sample rubbings of graphite and sepia oil pencil on rice paper (PAH 420)
Sample rubbings of graphite and sepia oil pencil on rice paper (PAH 420)
Sample rubbings of graphite and sepia oil pencil on rice paper (PAH 420)
Sample rubbings of graphite and sepia oil pencil on rice paper (PAH 420)
Students conducting fieldwork at Santa Cruz River bed at Cushing & Frontage (Martina Shenal)
Team images at the Santa Cruz River Bed taken with Insta360 cameras (PAH 420)
Team images at the Santa Cruz River Bed taken with Insta360 cameras (PAH 420)
PAH 420 students meanwhile worked with a diverse array of tools, including polaroids, sketches, 360 degree images, digital photography and rubbings, to support their development of public humanities projects. In these “traces from the field” we see that the groundwaters of our ways of knowing, we came to know, are multiple and intermingled. They are wellsprings of questions rather than answers: what stories can we learn and tell, past, present and future about bodies of water – from the Southside groundwater plume to the Santa Cruz river? How and why are such (water) stories hidden in plain sight, and who should tell them? What is the relationship between contamination and conservation? How can imagination, perception, creativity be a part of remediation?
As a whole, Groundwater II engages with visualization and storytelling challenges at the center of stories of the watershed, bringing arts and humanities research methods to the body of technical drawings, maps, and reports that dominate our way of knowing the complicated histories and actions of contamination and remediation, depletion and recharge.