In 2016, Food & Water Watch researcher Hugh MacMillan began looking into the funding sources for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a a 1,172-mile-long (1,886 km) underground oil pipeline that runs from northwest North Dakota to south central Illinois. At the time, protesters at the Standing Rock Reservation were desperately trying to block the oil pipeline’s construction on indigenous land. In an effort to spotlight for our supporters the interdependency between Big Oil and Wall Street, Food & Water Watch Digital Director Jo Miles and I decided to transform MacMillan’s comprehensive research into an easily digestible visual format that could be posted and shared across digital channels. In just under four days, we worked with Data Visualization Specialist Lily Boyce to produce a sankey graphic outlining the relationship between pipeline owner Energy Transfer Partners and the global financial institutions backing this controversial pipeline project. The image, “Who’s Banking Against the Sioux?”, was posted online alongside an overview of the issues at Standing Rock and shared individually on social media.
Los Angeles Artist Andrea Bowers came across the graphic while doing personal research on the Standing Rock protests. She contacted Food & Water Watch to inquire about collaborating on a temporary exhibit for The Hammer Museum that would feature the sankey in large format (what was eventually an entire 1.5 story inner museum wall). Lily and I worked to convert the original vertical graphic into a horizontal format that would work in the space provided by the Hammer Museum.
The installation premiered at the Hammer Museum on March 11, 2017 and ran through July 16, 2017. It accompanied individually silkscreened messages made by Bowers in support of the resistance at Standing Rock, as well as a fight to buy back the South Central Farm, an urban farming space in Los Angeles. As the protests at Standing Rock rose to prominence in the national news, the Obama administration halted construction of the pipeline until further environmental studies could be done. The web piece by Jo Miles became one of the top performing pieces of Food & Water Watch web content for 2016 and 2017, and the graphic made considerable waves throughout the environmental, social justice and indigenous rights communities. Unfortunately, with the inauguration of the Trump administration, DAPL construction was allowed to resume and the pipeline was completed in 2017.