Environmental artist Stacy Levy brings Santa Fe’s lost acequias back to life with Missing Waters, a temporary chalk water map installation at the Santa Fe Railyard April 25-29, 2025.
Stacy Levy: Missing Waters
April 25–29, 2025
Santa Fe Railyard
It’s hard to believe in the midst of persistent drought, but Santa Fe wasn’t always this dry. In the early 20th century more than forty acequias snaked through the city, providing sustenance for gardens and crops and riparian habitat for wildlife. In an effort to get in touch with the region’s more fluid past, environmental artist Stacy Levy will spearhead Missing Waters, a large-scale water map painted on surfaces throughout the Santa Fe Railyard. Presented by the Railyard Park Conservancy’s Railyard Art Project and Santa Fe–based curatorial platform Ecoartspace, it is the second of two RAP projects supported by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the City of Santa Fe’s Arts and Culture Department.
Created using a non-polluting mixture of chalk and water, Missing Waters will be installed in proximity to the still-active Acequia Madre and the now-dormant Acequia de los Pinos, Acequia de Analco, and Arroyo Tenorio. Over the course of three days, Levy will collaborate with local artists and students from New Mexico School for the Arts to apply the water map directly to the existing hardscape, using hydrological patterns that moving water creates with laminar flow and turbulence. The painting is meant to be temporary, wearing away in days under foot traffic, or washing away with the next rainstorm.
Levy has been working to evoke these ghost waterways since 2020, previously orchestrating projects in New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Akron, and Charlotte. “By conjuring these waterways that have been lost to urbanization, we can reconnect people to the history and ecosystems they used to hold,” says Levy. “Missing Waters is designed to allow a site within the built environment to tell its ecological story to the people that inhabit it.”
“We’re honored to host Stacy’s first Missing Waters installation west of the Mississippi,” says RPC executive director Izzy Barr. “As both a performative action—making visible the invisible, and as a collaborative bridging of art, ecology, history, and education, it epitomizes our vision for RAP’s community-based exhibitions.”
Levy is an internationally recognized environmental artist who combines art with science to create projects that show how nature functions in an urban setting. Her large-scale public installations have revolved around everything from the mosaic of growth in a vacant lot, to the flow of rainwater through a building. Levy is the Stormwater Artist-in-Residence for the City of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has been awarded the Henry Meigs Environmental Leadership Award, a PennFuture Award for Women in Conservation, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
Founded by Santa Fe resident and art and ecology curator Patricia Watts, Ecoartspace serves as a platform for artists addressing environmental issues. Since 2000, more than 2,000 artists, scientists, professionals, students, and advocates from twenty-nine countries have participated, sharing resources and supporting each other’s work. This is an inclusive, non-competitive collaborative environment where we can imagine and make real a healthy, equitable, resilient future.
railyardpark.org/public-art-program
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