Image: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson
‘Living With Injury’ remains on view in the East Wing Galleries at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson through September 27, 2026. The exhibition features work by artists, journalists and researchers with connections to the history of Tucson’s southside, including Alex! Jimenez, Franc Contreras and Dr. Denise Moreno Ramírez.
The exhibition offers a space to reflect on collective memory, acknowledge damages visited upon the community by defense-industry pollution and environmental racism, and celebrate the triumphs of southside organizers. It also poses questions about repairing human and more-than-human injury arising from extractive and exploitative industries and policies; how people, communities and ecosystems live with illness and disability; and how collective remembering, storytelling and memorializing can create the world anew.
In 2025, Tucsonans for a Clean Environment marked its 40th anniversary. The group organized in response to contamination. That year, investigative journalist Jane Kay published a series of articles in the Arizona Daily Star that publicly confirmed that pollution from defense industries was contaminating the aquifer, making people sick and, in too many cases, killing them.
‘Living With Injury’ is part of ‘Survival and Resistance: Remembering the Southside’s Environmental Justice Movement,’ a city-wide initiative comprising commemorations led by local institutions, artists and activists across Tucson. The initiative includes community events and collaborations focused on southside resistance, survival and healing. Its stated aims include generating conversation and knowledge about environmental justice, health and illness, water justice and Tucson’s Mexican American history.
Taylor’s most recent book, ‘Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert’ (University of California Press, 2024), is a history of the struggle for environmental justice on Tucson’s southside. Taylor works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental justice, multispecies studies and art practice, and is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley.
Contreras, a nonfiction filmmaker and veteran news correspondent, was born and raised on Tucson’s southside and graduated from Sunnyside High School in 1981. He is working on a feature-length documentary that explores how the historic TCE aquifer-contamination problem affected his community. Jimenez is a Chicana printmaker, illustrator, designer, mother and public artist whose practice explores her connection to land, culture and history as a fourth-generation Mexican American in Tucson. Moreno Ramírez is assistant director of the Earth League Secretariat at Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and works across environmental science and medical anthropology.
An exhibition image credits Taylor’s ‘Speculative Aquifer,’ a pen-and-ink work on rectangular paper, and Contreras’s ‘Ode to the Southside’ (video still), 2025. Spanish translations of exhibition materials are by Maria Torres Martinez.
