Jessica Henson

02/12/24 • 22 min

'What Water Wants' is designed to foster group learning in preparation for a long-term artwork by Rosten Woo at the Bowtie parcel along the Los Angeles river with The Nature Conservancy. The Bowtie parcel is owned by California State Parks and will include a 3-acre wetland demonstration project breaking ground later this year. This series will take us to rarely seen sites of water treatment, water modeling, and habitat creation in the company of scientists, policymakers, water scholars, and holders of cultural knowledge. 'What Water Wants' Tour 1 met at Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Preserve with guest speakers Jessica Henson, Mark Hanna, and Miguel Luna. Jessica Henson grew up playing in the creeks that lead to the Mississippi River, but her path to becoming the landscape architect she is now was an unlikely one. Her passion for creativity, design, and “a little bit of math” came together in high school when she declared to her parents that she would become an architect. She tried out a two-week architecture program and never looked back, going to architecture school and now landing work on Sepulveda Basin Vision Plan. She hopes the plan will engage the community, let natural habitats flourish, increase flood capacities, and more. Mark Hanna is a 5th generation Californian who grew up in a river town in the northern part of the state. Coming from a hardcore NorCal family who hated LA, Hanna swallowed his pride and entered a graduate program at UCLA in 1998. To his surprise, he fell in love with the city “within hours.” After graduating he got a job with the LADWP directing the restoration program of the Mono Basin up in the Eastern Sierras, where the LA Aqueduct brings water to the city. Since then, he has made his way down the river and is currently working for the city of Los Angeles on the Sepulveda Basin Vision Plan. Miguel Luna is a climate activist who has felt a connection to rivers since he was a child in Colombia. He calls them his kin, and they are why he says he’s “giving back to what’s given me so much.” Miguel is now on the Metropolitan Water Board of Southern California, where he makes decisions to educate youth about the importance of water and connect adults to “memories that they had in their countries of origin.”

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'the underpinning' conversation

In January 2024, park-goers joined Theresa Hwang, Molly Rysman, and Sissy Trinh in an illuminating conversation that activated the site of Rodrigo Valenzuela’s installation, 'the underpinning,' in Los Angeles State Historic Park through an exploration of urban planning grounded in the legacies of Chinatown and the surrounding neighborhoods. The speakers delved into the current landscape of housing in Los Angeles, drawing connections between systems of power and harm, the segregationist histories of land use, and the negotiations made by communities and policymakers when envisioning cultural infrastructures that reflect the identity and center the wellbeing of residents.

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'the underpinning' walk through with Rodrigo Valenzuela (Spanish)

On Saturday, February 24 2024, artist Rodrigo Valenzuela led a walk-through of 'the underpinning,' where he and attendees cultivated a bilingual dialogue, reflecting on the ways we relate to our built environments. Valenzuela explored the shared and divergent histories of government housing in Chile and the architectures of public housing in Los Angeles, and how each are distilled into the form of the installation to evoke possibility and resist a delimited conception of home.