Brackish Water Los Angeles examines the ecosystems, infrastructures, and politics surrounding brackish water, which is the space where salt and fresh waters meet. The book considers the larger implications of in-betweenness, including issues of access, inclusion, ecological racism, and cultural/class system interchanges along Los Angeles’s waterways. Text contributions include commissioned essays by co-curators Aandrea Stang and Debra Scacco, Emily Eliza Scott, and Connie Zheng; poetry by Robin Coste Lewis and Isaac Michael Ybarra; and “Undersea,” a 1937 essay written by preeminent writer and ecologist Rachel Carson. 

Brackish Water Los Angeles accompanies an exhibition of the same name which was presented from August through December 2024 at the University Art Gallery at California State University, Dominguez Hills, as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, an initiative of Getty.

Debra Scacco is a research-based artist whose work spans studio, public, pedagogical, and curatorial practices. Her installations, sculptures, drawings, and interventions live within the entanglement of ecology, infrastructure, and cultural memory; and are grounded in the knowledge that everything is connected. Scacco was the inaugural artist-in-residence within the City of Santa Monica Public Works Department (2023–26) and at Ellis Island Museum and Statue of Liberty National Monument (2012). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Durfee Foundation, and the City of Los Angeles; and has been exhibited at sites including Royal Academy of Arts (London), Los Angeles Public Library (Los Angeles), Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), and Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles). Scacco is co-founder of the Getty PST ART Climate Impact Program, a multi-year initiative dedicated to lessening the climate impact of exhibition-making. Scacco is co-director of Getty PST ART project Brackish Water Los Angeles. 

Aandrea Stang is an educator and curator/producer specializing in contemporary and socially engaged art practices. She is Director of the University Art Gallery at California State University, Dominguez Hills, where she also serves on the Art and Design Department faculty. Throughout her career, Stang has focused on institutional program development, creating and launching contemporary art and art education programs for diverse audiences at major cultural organizations, including Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Occidental College, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Known for her innovative programming and cross-institutional collaborations, she led MOCA’s Engagement Party (2008–12), a pioneering initiative supporting new work by emerging artists, and was the founding director of Occidental College’s Oxy Arts program. She is an active contributor to the region’s cultural landscape and serves as board president of the Feminist Center for Creative Work. Stang is co-director of Getty PST ART project Brackish Water Los Angeles. 

Rachel Carson, writer, scientist, and ecologist, worked for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries rising to become Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "Undersea" (1937, for the Atlantic Monthly), was Carson’s first prose article. In 1952 she published her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us, making Carson famous as a naturalist and science writer for the public. Carson is the author of Silent Spring (1962), which challenges the practices of agricultural scientists and the government.

Robin Coste Lewis is a former poet laureate for the city of Los Angeles (2017–21). She was born in Compton, California, and her family is from New Orleans. Lewis is the author of Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), winner of the National Book Award for Poetry—and the first poetry debut to win the award since 1974. Lewis’s writing has appeared in various journals and anthologies, such as Time Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Transition, and Best American Poetry. Lewis has taught on the faculty of Wheaton College, Hunter College, and Hampshire College. Lewis teaches in NYU’s low-residency MFA in Paris, and is a Professor of English at USC.

Emily Eliza Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar, educator, and artist who holds a joint professorship in Art History & Environmental Studies at University of Oregon, where she also co-directs the Center for Environmental Futures. She’s authored numerous essays on contemporary art and design that engages pressing (political) ecological issues; co-edited The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), Viscosity: Mobilizing Materialities (2019), and Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (2015); and is currently finishing a book on art that tracks environmental violence. Her work has been supported by major grants/awards from Creative Capital, College Art Association, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, and Graham, Mellon, and Switzer Foundations, among other institutions. She is a founding member of two art collectives, World of Matter (2011–17) and the Los Angeles Urban Rangers (2004–17), and was a National Park Service ranger in Utah and Alaska before entering academia.

Isaac Michael Ybarra, a visual artist and cultural worker, is Tongva, Chumash, and Xicano. Grounded in his ancestral cultivation, he utilizes film, photography, and poetry to amplify decolonial narratives and Indigenous pedagogies. He started coalition-building as an organizer with the American Indian Student Association at Cal State Northridge; leading his artistic practice of advocacy for the Indigenous community. As a fellow with the California Creative Corps in 2023, he began an anthology of film poems to undo the erasure of First Peoples in Los Angeles called 'Eyoomtax Yaraarkomok (Our Memories of Ourselves).

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer, and experimental filmmaker based out of xučyun (Berkeley, California). She uses multidisciplinary methods such as hand-drawn maps, analog animation, audiovisual installations, and participatory sculpture workshops to examine the intersections between public, personal and land-based knowledge, the geopolitics of labor, and the interplay between mythology and landscape. Her projects have been shown internationally, through venues such as the National Asian Culture Center (Gwangju, South Korea); Ilham Gallery (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia); Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA); and Esker Foundation (Calgary, AB, Canada). Her work is held in the collections of KADIST and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University, and she was featured in Phaidon Press’s Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art (2025). Her work has been covered in Artforum, ArtReview, ArtAsiaPacific, Ocula, and MUBI Notebook, among other publications, and she has published a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Nic Griffiths is a graphic designer and creative director with over 20 years of experience shaping visual identities for organisations both local and global. As co-founder of October Associates, he has led brand and design work for clients spanning arts and culture, business and finance, healthcare, technology and hospitality—including InterContinental Hotels, BlackBerry, ArtCenter College of Design, the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and the National Portrait Gallery (UK).

The University Art Gallery at California State University, Dominguez Hills serves both campus and broader communities as a laboratory for contemporary art and design practices. Through exhibitions and public programs, the Gallery fosters creative inquiry, supports artists, and cultivates meaningful engagement with diverse audiences. It is committed to advancing an innovative art and design culture that connects artistic practice with critical dialogue and community collaboration.

California State University, Dominguez Hills is a nationally recognized institution dedicated to justice, equity, and inclusion, fostering a strong sense of belonging and expanding social mobility for its students. Founded in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, CSUDH has long prioritized access to higher education for underserved communities and proudly serves a large population of first-generation college students. The university offers a transformative education grounded in culturally sustaining practices, research, creativity, and community engagement, preparing graduates to lead and thrive in an evolving global landscape.