Rios Pacheco felt compelled to talk about the importance of water after leading a Native American ceremony to dedicate Liberty Park’s Seven Canyon Refuge in Salt Lake City.
“We need to let our children know water doesn’t come from the tap,” said Pacheco, a member of Utah’s Northwestern Band of Shoshone. “Water isn’t something that is just given to us.”
That’s essentially the message of the new park feature, which transforms the old Seven Canyons Fountain into a thought-provoking representation of the Salt Lake Valley’s water system rather than a physical representation of it.
Salt Lake City unveiled the reimagined art feature on Thursday, five years after allocating a little more than $850,000 in capital improvement funds toward a new use for the old fountain. The new feature seeks to be a gathering place, teaching space and an area for residents to think about how water shapes lives, said Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall.
“It may not be an outright fountain anymore, but still flows with light and sound and touch,” she said. “It’s a place that asks us to think about water — not as something that we use, but as something that we are connected to and that we cannot live without.”
Reimagining the fountain
The Seven Canyons Fountain was a gift to the city from O.C. Tanner Company, which donated it in 1993. It replicated the seven creeks that flow into the Salt Lake Valley from the canyons east of it. While it was a popular splash pad, the city was forced to shut off the water in 2017 amid health and safety concerns brought up by the county.
City officials determined that it would cost millions of dollars to repair, and it would have also consumed tens of thousands of gallons of water daily, Mendenhall explained. Yet, given the feature’s popularity, the city decided in 2023 that it would be replaced with a “dry” art feature, with one of the piece’s original artists, Stephen Goldsmith, hired alongside the landscape architecture firm ArcSitio to reimagine it into something new.
The new piece aimed to provide a “new lens” that addresses sustainability, creativity and stewardship, says Kim Shelley, director of the Salt Lake City Department of Parks and Public Lands. It highlights the need to conserve water and other water challenges that have emerged across the West since the fountain debuted.
Utah and others in the region have suffered through a series of droughts since 2000, referred to as a “megadrought.” Researchers determined that the regional drought is the worst in 1,200 years. That’s led to concerns about water supply, while bodies of water like the Great Salt Lake dipped to an all-time low level in 2022.
What’s new
New elements were installed to add different ways for people to engage with it. Those who attended Thursday’s ceremony were given filled water bottles to pour into a new shishi-odoshi system, which is a Japanese rock water fountain feature that helps replicate how precipitation fills the county’s creeks. The dry creeks lead to a spiral at the northwestern edge of the piece that represents the Great Salt Lake.
Cast bronze repairs, which city officials say are inspired by the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery, were included to “evoke resilience and healing,” according to the city.
More than a dozen bronze “people perches” are also scattered throughout the area with QR codes that lead people to the bird calls of native birds, along with a sonogram of that bird call etched into the piece. It seeks to celebrate the over 180 bird species that one may find in the park, in addition to the Tracy Aviary inside the park, said Felicia Baca, director of the Salt Lake City Arts Council.
Some of the city’s history is also included, as a depiction of Salt Lake City’s historic streetcar lines — originally powered by creek water — is included as a symbol of the connection between transportation and hydrology in recent times.
There are also granite tiles with Indigenous imagery etched in that celebrate the area’s long Native American history, while the Native American names of the seven creeks were also added.
“These features ask us to think about what kind of repairs do we want to make with other places, with the environment and people — and even ourselves,” Baca said. “This project really exemplifies what can emerge when we combine public art, environmental education and equity-driven design.”