Missing Waters

By Stacy Levy

Listen to Stacy Levy and ecoartspace’s Patricia Watts discuss Missing Waters with Matthew Chase-Daniel on his “Coffee and Culture” podcast.

As unlikely as it seems in the midst of persistent drought, Santa Fe wasn’t always this dry. In the early 1900s, more than 40 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 spearheaded Missing Waters, a large-scale water map painted on surfaces throughout the Santa Fe Railyard in April 2025. Over the course of three days, Levy collaborated with local artists, students from New Mexico School for the Arts, and passersby to apply the water map directly to the existing hardscape, using hydrological patterns that moving water creates with laminar flow and turbulence. The painting was designed 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 and Brooklyn, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Akron, OH; and Charlotte, NC. “By conjuring these waterways that have been lost to urbanization, we can reconnect people to the history and ecosystems they used to hold” said Levy. “Missing Waters is designed to allow a site within the built environment to tell its ecological story to the people that inhabit it.”

Missing Waters was supported in part by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by the City of Santa Fe’s Arts and Culture Department.