Water carries the stories of our stars marks the expansive museum debut of artist Priscilla Dobler Dzul, who lives between Tacoma, Washington, and Yucatán, Mexico. The exhibition brings together an entirely new body of sculpture, textile, and video works that articulate urgent narratives of environmental harm and cultural justice. Drawing from her Maya and multicultural heritage, the artist intertwines ancestral memory with contemporary ecological concerns, positioning her practice within a broader continuum of Indigenous knowledge. Each piece becomes a vessel through which she examines how the loss of water reshapes landscapes, histories, and futures.

Building on years of research and intimate collaborations with Yucatec Maya elders, Dobler Dzul employs pre-Hispanic techniques and regionally sourced materials to honor traditions that have endured despite centuries of displacement and erasure. Whether referencing the sacred cenotes of Mexico or the wetlands of the Pacific Northwest, her works highlight water as both life-giving and vulnerable—an element whose disappearance carries profound environmental and cultural consequences. Her textiles, sculptures, and moving-image works echo the rhythms of community labor, ritual, and storytelling, offering viewers an entry point into ways of knowing that exceed Western frameworks of nature and time.

Throughout the exhibition, living waters emerge as portals of cosmic and ancestral knowledge, realms in which spirituality, ecology, and cosmology are inseparable. Dobler Dzul invites viewers to listen—to the birds, the shifting winds, the wisdom of elders, and the messages carried by water itself. In doing so, she proposes a reimagining of collective existence rooted in reciprocity and care. Through the labor of craft, the artist asserts the transformative potential of Indigenous worldviews, reminding us that healing the planet requires not only environmental action but also a profound reconnection to the stories that flow through the natural world.