郭蓓华21. Photo by Xingjian Han.
Photographer and Pitzer alum Beihua Guo ’21 has received $5,000 as a finalist for The Aftermath Project’s 1492/1619 American Aftermaths grant. 郭敬明的项目, “Water Is Thicker Than Blood,” illustrates the ignored and forgotten history of the 洛杉矶 Aqueduct and the California water wars.
According to its website, The Aftermath Project is a nonprofit that supports photographers “to educate the public about the real cost of war and the true price of peace.” The 1492/1619 American Aftermaths grant focuses on what it describes as the ongoing reverberations of America’s original sins: Columbus’ “discovery” of and assault on Indigenous peoples in 1492 and the first enslaved Africans’ arrival in 1619.
Guo has described the L.A. Aqueduct as “a story of greed, violence, oppression, and disastrous environmental consequences.” According to Guo, the Owens Valley Paiute people lived in harmony with nature until white settlers arrived, and 洛杉矶 drained Owens Lake. This caused toxic dust storms in the 1920s and financially and ecologically destroyed Owens Valley. L.A. Aqueduct extended into the Mono Basin in the 1940s. Forty years later, Mono Lake’s water level dropped more than 40 feet.
“即使在今天, people living in the Owens Valley still have to deal with the environmental consequences of the aqueduct,郭说.
莫诺湖，2022年. Rehydration Ceremony, 1982.
Guo combined photographs and archive-based art for his project. According to Guo’s website, he “used an outdoor projector to project newspaper headlines, 文本, and historical images onto the surfaces of ruins, 纪念碑, and engineering features along the aqueduct.”
Guo has a bachelor’s degree in studio art and environmental analysis from Pitzer. Although he created the art for “Water Is Thicker Than Blood” after graduation, his research stemmed from a Pomona College class called Water in the West taught by Professor Char Miller ’75, who is also a Pitzer alum.
The Claremont Colleges Library Special Collections, which numbers nearly 200,000 volumes and spans 900 years of human history, served as a rich resource for Guo’s work. 郭使用了 newspaper insert from Special Collections for one of his projections.
莫诺湖，2022年. Headline, Mono Lake Committee, circa. 1978.
郭敬明的项目 was made possible in part through funding from the Lucie Foundation and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers’ Scholastic Art & Writing Awards 校友 Microgrant Program. His work has also recently appeared in installations at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art and Grand Park, 洛杉矶, 由L提供.A. County Department of Arts and Culture. See more of Guo’s work at www.photoguo.com/la-aqueduct
