Just Add Water

Just Add Water is an exhibition featuring a series of installation-based artworks made by artists ages 5-13. These works investigate and illustrate historical and contemporary conditions around water access and its relationship to systemic inequality. Water is a commodity, a community gathering space, and a basic human right. Water is necessary for survival. It is simultaneously a symptom and a structural component of social equity divisions.

Students examined this vital resource as a means to discuss environmental concerns, such as water usage, as well as social issues, such as swimming pool segregation and the Flint water crisis.

What are the implications of nearly 800 million people worldwide having no access to clean water? How does a study of water access highlight social justice issues? Where and how do environmental concerns intersect with social justice issues?

The work in Just Add Water is intended to pose these questions in an open-ended way, encouraging both the artists and viewers to think critically about the complex ways in which resource access and allocation are entangled within larger systems of power and what it might take to make positive changes to those systems.