“Wildcats in Water” is a monthly seminar series hosted by NU Water at Northwestern University, showcasing student and faculty research on water technology and policy. It serves as a hub for collaborative research on water security, quality, and sustainability
On April 8, the Wildcats in Water student seminar series, which typically hears from scientists and researchers, looked at water through a different lens: art. Block Museum Student Associate Laurel Anderson joined the group to lead a close-looking exercise with Tó Łitso #17, a photograph from the exhibition Teresa Montoya’s Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill, on view at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art through June 14, 2026.
NU Water member and civil and environmental engineering PhD candidate Claire McGillis noted that the club aims to make water research at Northwestern more interdisciplinary, with art serving as “a way to bridge those two divides.”
Laurel Anderson is a sophomore studying Environmental Engineering and Archaeology with interests in the intersections of art, craft, identity, and infrastructure and how they shape broader social structures. As they led the group through an examination of Montoya’s photograph, they encouraged attendees to engage with the work and its themes of water justice.
The exhibition Tó Łitso (Yellow Water) marks the ten-year anniversary of the Gold King Mine disaster. On August 5, 2015, the rupture of the abandoned Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado released more than three million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Animas River, turning its waters a shocking shade of yellow. In the following year, Montoya (Diné, born 1984) embarked on a road trip from Silverton to Shiprock, New Mexico, retracing the path of the contaminated water and documenting its ongoing cultural, spiritual, and material effects on the Navajo Nation and other Indigenous communities downstream.
Anderson selected Tó Łitso #17 for close looking because Montoya’s photography expresses what cannot be captured in purely academic language.
In Tó Łitso #17 (Yellow Water #17), a sign warning humans and animals not to drink the water is posted at a former uranium mill site in Shiprock, NM, on the Navajo Nation. The mill contains approximately 1.5 million tons of uranium mill tailings waste produced during its years of operation from 1954 to 1968. Through a series of Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action (UMTRA) stabilization projects, the site also holds the 11-acre open evaporation pond seen to the left, where waste is concentrated for removal. Although a fence surrounds the site, there have been published concerns about the hazards it poses to wildlife, particularly migratory birds.
“To me the image so perfectly visualizes one example of the harms and history carried by water infrastructure, which are often ignored from the perspective of engineering — the discipline most heavily represented in NU Water’s regular attendees.”
Anderson noted that giving a talk to a larger group was a bit different from the art talks Block Museum Student Associates usually lead, in part because attendees could not get up close and engage with a physical work. Even so, everyone was “wonderfully engaged and contributed to a fantastic discussion,” and they expressed hope that the session would encourage people to see Montoya’s work who might not otherwise have been aware of it.
“Representing the Block and specifically speaking about Teresa’s work has been both a joy and a privilege.”
As McGillis noted, NU Water’s meetings are “not just about research” but about “all aspects of water and connecting people who are interested in water all throughout campus.” The April session reflected that mission, bringing together students and faculty across disciplines to consider, as Montoya’s exhibition puts it, water “not only as a life-sustaining resource but also as a conduit for histories, stories, and harm.”
Get involved: water@northwestern.edu
