Series

ECOTONES

ON VIEW NOW

Meech Boakye: watering

A screening and foraged gathering

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Paige Emery: The Banana Leaf is a Container Technology

On the occasion of the exhibition Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism (Sept 15-Dec 22, 2024), The Brick and Active Cultures are partnering to present a series of events, ECOTONES. Four public programs will be led by an artist or artist-collective to explore local agriculture, foraging, food and herbalism as ritual, and biodiversity.

Through this collaboration, these two L.A.-based art organizations are modeling an ecofeminist ethos by sharing authorship, and collectively generating materials and resources. Taking place in conjunction with the Getty Foundation’s ambitious initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide, ECOTONES will be part of a region-spanning cultural moment, reaching vast audiences interested in the intersection of art, food, feminism, and sustainability. 

Programs

September 22, 2024
ritual paintings and a Kamayan Feast with Paige Emery

Paige Emery is an artist, herbalist and plant dreamer exploring rituals of remembering the Earth. Her work is interested in interweaving healing rituals and critical ecology, ancestral memory and embodied futurities, ecopoetics and socioenvironmental praxis. Stemming from a background in art, herbalism, critical ecophilosophy, environmental activism, and learning from the Earth, Paige’s decolonial and ecofeminist practice serves to recalibrate the internal landscape to the external landscape. This takes shape through multitudes of entangled forms such as paintings alchemized with plants, site-specific land art installations, plant rituals for more-than-human communication, performance lectures, guided ecology walks, and sharing herbal remedies with her community.

October 13, 2024
a film screening and foraged food with Meech Boakye

Meech Boakye is an artist and writer currently based in Portland, Oregon. Their practice is rooted in relationships with floral, fungal, and microbial kin as armatures for learning how to be in community. Material research functions as a formal conduit for remediation from extractive landscapes while relational works attempt to imagine speculative futures embedded in care. Works are suspended in gelatin biopolymers; fed, aged, shared; digested in stomachs or piles of hot compost; coded, or are collaboratively written with friends and neural-network AI.

November 2, 2024
a SPROUTIME kids workshop with Leslie Labowitz-Starus 

Leslie Labowitz-Starus, Los Angeles artist and entrepreneur, is best known for her public performance work on violence against women in collaboration with Suzanne Lacy from 1977–82. In 1972, she was a Fulbright scholar in Germany, where she worked with Joseph Beuys, and considers herself an Art/Life artist. Since 1980, her art work has shifted to ecological concerns, primarily focusing on food and agriculture. For over 30 years, Labowitz-Starus created performances and installations while building a business, called SPROUTIME. She began as an urban farmer, growing sprouts in her backyard in Venice and expanded her operation to a three-quarter acre agricultural site and food processing facility in the San Fernando Valley in LA County, growing, manufacturing and distributing organic products throughout Southern California. She is considered an expert in the field of sprouting and an authority on urban farming and farmers’ markets.

December 7, 2024
a gathering with Mexico City and Oaxaca-based colectivo amasijo

colectivo amasijo is a group of women from different parts of Mexico (Veracruz, Oaxaca, State of Mexico, and Mexico City) united in their desire to actively reflect on the origin and diversity of our food. The collective was born in 2019 and ever since, has been providing a platform for non–dominant voices: the narratives of women close to the land, stories that tell us the real cost of climate change and show us the way towards the regeneration of the land. As an open collective, they cook collectively to share, learn, care, conserve, relate, and celebrate the (bio)diversity of food. Their projects are aimed at making visible the interdependence between language, culture, and territory. Through these projects, that can take the form of gatherings, dinners, research, actions, ceremonies, exhibitions, markets, seminars, film, talks or other the collective builds the needed structures to form a community in which taking care and taking care of the territory in relation to food is priority.

Registration is free, all are welcome.

About Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism

Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism is a group exhibition inspired by four decades of ecofeminist thought and action in art. Ecofeminism is a theoretical and activist movement that locates critical connections between gender oppression and the exploitation of natural resources. In the U.S., it developed from the environmental, anti-nuclear, and feminist movements in the late 1970s and 1980s; in addition to their primary concerns around the subordination of nature and women, ecofeminists sought to resist racism, homophobia, and the capitalist patriarchy. As quickly as the movement was developed, artists began adopting an ecofeminist position, producing ambitious, often site-specific work that addressed the systemic subjection of women and the environment. Using ecofeminism as both a lens and departure point, works in this exhibition address themes including social ecologies, the commons, indigenous cosmologies, lesbian separatism, witchcraft, hydrofeminism, plant knowledge, science fiction, and speculative futures, among other threads. The exhibition will be accompanied by a scholarly publication and will travel to the alternative art space West Den Haag in the Hague, the Netherlands in 2025. Support for the exhibition is provided by the Getty Foundation, the Margaret Morgan and Wesley Phoa Fund, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Knox Foundation.

About PST ART: Art & Science collide

Southern California’s landmark arts event, PST ART, returns in September 2024, presenting more than 70 exhibitions from organizations across the region exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art.

Credits

Active Cultures’ programs this year are made possible through the generous support of its Board of Directors; the Gatherers Annual Fund; the Los Angeles Visual Arts (LAVA) Coalition; the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture as part of Creative Recovery LA, an initiative funded by the American Rescue Plan; the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture; and the California Arts Council.

Support for this program series is provided by Kim and Keith Allen-Niesen, The Maurice Marciano Family Foundation, and Olivia Marciano.