The Lost River and the Missing Lake

Lost River/ Missing Lake: The Politics of Water in
Los Angeles. This class will explore specific ways
to transform real-world research into multi-form
artworks. The research at the core of the class
will focus on the problems of water scarcity in
Los Angeles and the Southwest, and will consider
various histories, politics, technologies and
plans. Los Angeles is built on dry chaparral,
originally irrigated by a seasonal river. To grow
it had to import water and in the early 20th
Century the Los Angeles Aqueduct drained Owens
Lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada,
turning it into a dust bowl. This aqueduct passes
through Santa Clarita on its way to Los Angeles.
It was soon evident that this system would not
support the growing city, and in the 1930s a new
aqueduct was built to bring water from the
Colorado River at Parker Dam. This system fed the
eastern part of the metropolis, and also allowed
the development of the desert cities around Palm
Spings and Coachella. In the 1960s the State
developed an even more ambitious aqueduct system
to bring water from the Sacramento Delta area to
all of Southern California, and the Los Angeles
branch terminates at Castaic Lake. The entire area
is in a multi-year drought and there is growing
concern about future sustainability. Can we find
new sources of water, or ways to use less? Artists
cannot solve problems of this magnitude, but by
understanding them and considering them together,
we may open a discussion that will then lead to
solutions.

The class will be structured around a series of
lectures and presentations, as well as a number of
field trips to various water significant sites in
Santa Clarita and Los Angeles.