On Sunday, the Santa Cruz River was the site for an opening reception of “The Landing Place,” an original art installation crafted by artists Maxie Adler and Kimi Eisele. 

The installation, set up at Verdugo Park, features 14 handmade windsocks, each with a different black and white image highlighting important elements of the past and present life in the Santa Cruz River.

“We just wanted to celebrate the life that has come back to the river since about 2019. They started pumping effluent water into this portion,” said Eisele, a Tucson artist and writer. 

Effluent water is treated with a process that allows it to be reused safely. 

The Heritage Reach Project, which started in 2019, has brought back “a lot of the original and new riparian area. There had been an infall farther north around Prince,” Eisele said. “It’s such a beautiful part of the city, but so many people don’t know that the water is down there and that all these species have come back to it.”

Each design on the windsocks “magnifies some of the small life that’s in the riverbed now,” like the Vermillion flycatcher and the Western pygmy blue butterfly, she said.

Adler, a visual artist in Tucson, said the Santa Cruz River “personally is my source of hope and my teacher and how I learn most things. It is also just a huge inspiration for all of the artwork that I do. So this is a celebration and invitation for people to be here to be in relationship to the river to understand its history, its past, its present and its future and to appreciate that life is returning to it.”

Adler and Eisele received funding for the project from the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson’s Nightbloom grant. 

“We wrote the grant, we made the designs and we figured out how to get the work printed onto fabric.” Eisele said. 

“The Landing Place” features a range of designs from lesser-known animals and plants, like the Aztec dancer dragonfly and the Couch’s spadefoot toad, to human elements such as the bottom of a Polar Pop cup and a shopping cart.

“I think people think this is a ditch or a wash and haven’t gone into it to see there’s water. And there’s Cattail and endangered fish in the river. There’s the Sonora mud turtle; all of these species are calling this place home with us, and I think the more people know about that, the more they’ll respect and be inspired to look closer, ” Adler said.

The color choice of black and white symbolizes the past and the future. Black represents animals that have come and gone from the river, while still honoring the cycle of life, according to Eisele’s website. White represents the future, in the example of the river being in an ever-changing current. 

“You get a chance to kind of soak things in a little more,” said Greg Colburn, a local dancer who attended the reception. “There are things that I’ve seen riding by on the river path, but I don’t usually come down and take a closer look. So it’s kind of nice to see that. and the flags, I love the graphic that represents each of the things. just kind of nice to see a design pop of that.”

Adler said the artists picked species that are often overlooked, including the endangered Gila topminnow.

“You know, this tiny little fish that’s remaining in bodies of water down in the river,” she said. “There’s also thousands and thousands of duckweed, which is the tiniest little dot of a plant that just lives on the surface of the water.” 

The installation will stay up until its closing ceremony on Saturday, May 10, also known as Santa Cruz River Day. The closing will be held from 5-10 p.m at Verdugo Park, 902 S. Verdugo Ave. 

Arizona Sonoran News is a news service of the University of Arizona School of Journalism.