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Artist Statement: We are dyeing wool with dyestuff from invasive and non-native plants growing on Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands archipelago in California, investigating the complex and intertwined influence humans have on our ecosystems, and the aesthetic, emotional, magical, and medicinal interrelationships between humans, plants and color. The wool is spun into yarn, the yarn woven into shawls. In addition, we are constructing a database of natural dye colors and various methods for visualizing and organizing that data, using a wide range of systematics, from scientific to alchemical. The organisms (many plants and one insect, cochineal) we are working with, were brought to the island over an extended period of time, starting when it was first colonized by Europeans. New organisms were still consciously introduced in the late 20th century. For example, cochineal (coincidentally a very important source of red dye) was brought to the island in the late sixties to help kill off the cactuses which were considered a hazard to the cows grazing on the island. The human immigrants had a relationship to these organisms in their home lands for millennia, many of these plants have been used for food, medicine, magic and dyes. Just as with humans, some behave better than others when arriving in a new land. Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes about Broadleaf plantain with affection in “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.” To her, plantain is a model citizen, a foreign-born who is not colonizing. It’s a generous and healing newcomer, who is truly listening to the new environment. Other plants are infamous for wreaking havoc in the eco-systems they “invade”. On Santa Cruz Island, fennel, a sweet smelling, delicious plant, which is highly medicinal, traditionally used for protection magic and yields a magical yellow color, has taken over large swaths of land to the detriment of the native flora. It is now one of the many plants targeted for eradication from the island in a major conservation effort aiming to restore it to a more (real or perceived) natural state. The sheep breeds producing the wool and yarns we are working with have an historical connection to Santa Cruz Island. It’s believed that the Santa Cruz Island sheep breed stems from sheep of several breeds, potentially including Merino, Rambouillet (a French version of Merino), and English Leicester, brought to Santa Cruz Island in the mid 19th century for wool and meat production. Over the years, the sheep increased in numbers and became feral, causing massive erosion to the landscape. In the nineties, consistent with restoration efforts on the island, the sheep, then in the tens of thousands, were eradicated. Due to the methods used (very few sheep were brought to the mainland, most were shot on the island) the endemic Santa Cruz Island breed has ironically become one of the five most critically endangered breeds on the Livestock Conservancy's conservation priority list. The wool from these sheep speaks about the landscape where the individual sheep lead their lives and the breed emerged. Its staple length and crimp, the soil and vegetable matter trapped in it, reveals something about the sheep, the breed and their environment (craftspeople now speak of the 'terroir' of wool.) Interlopings: Invasive Species / Endemic Breeds is a process-based collaborative art project combining traditional techniques such as dyeing, spinning and weaving, with data visualization and ‘performative science’ and ‘relational aesthetics’ strategies. The public is invited to participate in the process through workshops and exhibitions and to have a direct visual, olfactory and tactile experience with animals and plants that have been introduced to the island. By smelling and touching the wool, inspecting the insects and vegetable matter stuck to it, getting dazzled by rich and subtle colors given to us by the plants and sensing the warmth from the finished shawls, the audience-participants inadvertently explore a wide array of topics. They might gain insights into issues ranging from aspects of the natural and cultural history of the Channel Islands and conservation, to topics related to the Anthropocene and chemistry. Some of the questions this project evoke are: How do we define what a “native” species is? When was 'wild'? How do we decide where species belong? What animals 'deserve' our protection? What is the goal with conservation? What ends justifies what means? (Growing up in Sweden in the seventies, we marched to the catchy chant “sluta spruta” - stop spraying, while the children today learn that one of the most significant dangers to our natural environment are alien species.) While these issues will be discussed in the workshops and exhibitions, this is an art project relying on visual, tactile, and olfactory modalities of generating meaning. As such the most important questions will be asked, and maybe answered, in the direct experiences of hands, noses, and eyes and in the relationships created between people and between people, processes and materials.

A long-term art research project that has worked since 2017 in the industrialized high-altitude deserts of northern Chile's Atacama. There, copper and lithium mining for global supply chains reshapes a former seabed with rare geologic and living systems. Drawing on intensive fieldwork, the artists build multichannel sound, video, photography, live audiovisual performance and installation, and use mirage and perceptual distortion rather than documentary to question the idea of the desert as wasteland. They also note that the region has served as a Mars-analog test site. Works include Salar: Evaporation (2020), shown in the group exhibition Against Outer Space at UC Irvine's Beall Center for Art + Technology, and Salar: Adaptation, presented at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in 2024. A feature film and an artist book are in progress.

A public sculpture and working fog catcher made of eight amorphous, cloud-like rings, each strung with copper mesh that weathers to a sky-blue color. Coastal fog condenses on the mesh, and the water drips into the soil below to nourish the surrounding wetland plantings. The sculpture was made by artist Anja Ulfeldt for UC Santa Cruz's Art+Fog Collective, and microbiologist and environmental toxicologist Peter Weiss-Penzias tested the water it gathered. It was installed in December 2024 in the marshlands around Younger Lagoon, just west of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, as part of restoration efforts there.

A 71-minute documentary that begins when the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires force Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens to evacuate their home in the Boulder Creek redwoods. From there, the artists approach fire as an element to relate to and care for rather than only fight. Mixing humor, grief and performance art, the film draws on firefighters (including formerly incarcerated firefighters), Indigenous scholars, ecologists, artists and a witch therapist, and part of the narration is voiced by a mythical white peacock named Albert. It connects California's wildfires and climate change to questions of social justice and ends with a ceremonial wedding to fire in the redwoods. It is the third film in the pair's ecosexual series, after Goodbye Gauley Mountain (2014) and Water Makes Us Wet (2019). It premiered at Frameline49 at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco on June 20, 2025.

A free, interactive online atlas that traces the ecologies that arise when nonhuman beings become entangled with human infrastructures, which its editors argue are the substance of the Anthropocene. Readers move through the atlas along routes of "detonators," "tippers" and "feral qualities." Along the way they find nearly 80 field reports by scientists and humanists alongside video, artwork, poetry and music, as well as a reading room and curriculum suggestions. The project was curated and edited by UC Santa Cruz anthropologist Anna Tsing with Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, and published as a digital book by Stanford University Press. ArtReview ranked it 15th on its 2020 Power 100 list.

Led by UC San Diego composer Lei Liang and Qualcomm Institute engineer Falko Kuester, this interdisciplinary initiative brings together music composition students and researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography to explore the creative possibilities of marine science. Through a collaborative seminar, participants translate underwater recordings and scientific imaging—including Arctic ice formations, whale echolocation, and coral reef scans—into original musical compositions and immersive experiences. Projects include a virtual reality sound installation presented at the Qualcomm Institute’s SunCAVE in 2018 and a 2019 performance by the Mivos Quartet and students featuring compositions informed by Arctic field recordings.

Led by UCLA artist Victoria Vesna in collaboration with the Science Visualization Lab at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, this immersive art–science installation explores the effects of human activity on marine ecosystems. Drawing on 3D imaging of plankton and underwater sound recordings, the work transforms microscopic organisms into monumental forms while revealing the acoustic disturbances caused by ships, sonar, and offshore extraction. An interactive balance board allows visitors to influence the underwater environment through their movements, connecting physical balance to ecological vulnerability. First developed as a video in 2017, the project evolved into interactive 3D and virtual reality experiences and was presented at the 2019 SIGGRAPH Art Gallery in Los Angeles, among other international venues.

A speculative hybrid creature built from roughly 2,000 pounds of e-waste gathered around the Bay Area, staged by Jill Miller and Asma Kazmi, who work together as the Missing Object Library. Cables, server racks, monitors and cooling units recreate the look of a server farm, while animated video traces the materials back to the rare earth mines they came from; smaller 'offspring' forms made of lithium, cobalt and silicon appeared on lobby monitors. The work pushes back on the idea that the cloud, big data and AI are weightless, pointing to their energy demands, extraction and labor. A first version was installed in October 2023; the full installation filled the Gray Area Gallery in San Francisco from April 22 to July 20, 2025, commissioned through Gray Area's C/Change program with Goethe-Institut San Francisco and supported in part by the UC Berkeley Center for New Media and UC Berkeley Surplus.

A series of six guided, embodied exercises by Zheng Bo that invite participants to move beyond a human-centered view of the world and connect with other living things, especially plants. They include Collecting Tree Qi, Drinking Sun Exercise, Drawing Weeds Practice and Sacred Grove Ritual; some are the artist's own, and others draw on practices from other cultures. The series was presented in 2021 in his exhibition Wanwu Council at Gropius Bau, Berlin, and Zheng Bo is among the artists in Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology at La Galería, UC Merced (2025).

This work is an outdoor projection-mapping installation commissioned by the UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art. Over two nights in April 2024, images of late 19th- and early 20th-century California landscape paintings from the museum's collection, among them Granville Redmond's California Landscape with Flowers and Hanson Duvall Puthuff's Mystical Hills, were projected onto the buildings of UC Irvine's School of Social Sciences, setting painted light against dusk and night and building to a finale overlooking Aldrich Park. The French title means "outdoors in the outdoors"; the project was presented with the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and the School of Social Sciences. Plein-Air en Plein Air builds on the curatorial activities of another project commissioned by Langson IMCA, Beyond the Frame: Impressions of California, created by the design studio Imaginary Places. This immersive virtual presentation features images of the same 28 California Impressionist paintings and sets them in a stylized digital landscape with associated artists’ biographies, literary and historical texts, archival images, and environmental sound elements. Together, these two very different projects work to catalyze curiosity and foster conversation and exploration of California Art in the public realm.

A floor sculpture by Anirudh Shaktawat, a heap of rubble (brick, concrete and lime) measuring 66 × 150 inches, from his series Chaumasa: Four Months of Monsoon. It is the featured image of Language of Nature, Language of Culture: Towards a Decolonial Art History, the South Asia Art Initiative's research project at UC Berkeley.

An artist's book and photographic installation by Latipa (Michelle Dizon), with poetry by Việt Lê, made from an archive of National Geographic magazines from the 1960s and earlier. Dizon erased most of the text on each page, leaving fragments that form a decolonial counterpoint to the magazine's imperialist, Western-centric images of people and lands, and Lê added original poetry and a text on the legacies of war and empire. The book was published in 2018 by at land's edge (Los Angeles), Candor Arts (Chicago) and Sming Sming Books (Bay Area), and the work was exhibited at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, from March 20 to July 31, 2018.

A multi-image slide installation by Latipa (Michelle Dizon) built from photographs of the U.S. colonial and postcolonial Philippines, drawn from archives in the Philippines and the United States, the artist's family albums and the internet. It takes the form of a conversation between the artist's great-great-grandmother in 1905 and a descendant in 2123, both named Latipa; the future Latipa lives after climate catastrophe has made Earth uninhabitable and is traveling to Proxima B. Setting official archival photographs against intimate family images, the work links colonial harm to people and to the environment and traces how its effects outlast colonial rule. It was shown in the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowships exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 2018 and at the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in 2019.

A seven-channel video installation by Latipa, then working as Michelle Dizon, from her ongoing series on imperialism, neocolonialism and globalization in the Philippines. Footage shot over four years in the Philippines is combined with archival film, philosophical, political and literary texts and field recordings, moving through sites near former U.S. military bases, multinational resource extraction, with chapters on mining, fishing and banana plantation labor, and war-torn regions of the southern Philippines. Developed as a Lab Artist project at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, and curated there by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, it was shown from June 18 to September 7, 2012, and was also presented as a live performance with narration and a live score at the Hammer Museum during Made in L.A. 2012. The artist later founded the Memory and Resistance Laboratory at UC Riverside.

A data animation by UC Berkeley artist and professor Greg Niemeyer, shown nightly on the crown screen of Salesforce Tower, San Francisco, throughout December 2024, and all night around the winter solstice. Built in Blender with Python, it condenses a year of open data, from the summer solstice of 2023 to that of 2024, into rhythms of the Bay Area: rainfall, wind, tides, sea surface temperature, air quality, foliage, seismic activity, solar radiation and BART ridership. The data came from NASA, NOAA, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and the Berkeley Seismology Lab, among others, and NASA program scientist Chelle Gentemann advised on the satellite data. The work was invited through the Day for Night Monthly Artist Program.

Mounds and rivulets of adobe spread across sheets of paper laid in archival flat files, made by Christine Howard Sandoval, a member of the Chalon Indian Nation. Set out like an archive, the earth asks what records of land and memory can hold. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz, alongside her The First Color Is Red.

A video by Suné Woods made after her 2024 visit to Coquí, on Colombia’s Gulf of Tribugá, where she observed humpback whale biopsies alongside marine ecologist Dr. Natalia Botero-Acosta. Centering the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous knowledge of the region, the work asks what it means to learn from other species. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz.

A triptych video installation by Mia Eve Rollow that layers new footage, archival images, and news media around the tides and the symbolic life of the sea across cultures to explore ocean ecologies. One passage follows a whale fall, the carcass of a whale sustaining deep-sea life. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz.

Sixty-three pages of hand-dyed paper by Christine Howard Sandoval, a member of the Chalon Indian Nation, blind-embossed with faint phrases in her Chalon Ohlone ancestral language. Rising across the wall in bands of color, the pages touch on plant medicine, Indigenous knowledge, and the harms of colonization. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz, alongside her Fourth Person Singular.

Photographs of the legs and feet of displaced women in Medellín, Colombia, by Colombian artist and physician Libia Posada, each marked with an inked map of the journey that took the woman from her home. The maps trade compass points for right and left and measure distance in strides, recording displacement as it is carried in the body. Posada first exhibited Signos Cardinales in 2009; this version was shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz.

A garden built within the footprint of a solitary confinement cell and planted at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz, by artist and prison abolitionist Jackie Sumell in collaboration with Tim Young. Part of Sumell’s Solitary Gardens project and the IAS Visualizing Abolition initiative, the work turns the architecture of isolation into a space of growth and care.

A multimedia installation by Sharon Daniel that traces the climate crisis as lived in Kivalina, an Iñupiat village on a barrier island in northwest Alaska, through oral testimonies, archival images, and ice core scans. A long lit table holds photographs, documents, timelines, and a vintage radio beneath a wall-sized image of the village. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz.

A sound and video installation by the Whale Liberation Front, the collective of Imani Jacqueline Brown, Cory Diane, and Peter J. Bowling, that imagines how whales in the Gulf of Mexico experience the seismic airgun blasts used to search for oil and gas. Water fills an inverted oil drum with images playing across its surface and a hydrophone hanging above it, beside a hand-painted map of the Gulf marked with alternative place names. Members of the collective also performed a live electroacoustic piece with zither, synthesizers, voice, water, and rare recordings of Gulf whale song at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz.

Sixty ceramic sperm whale teeth heaped on a wooden shipping pallet, part of the BREACH series that Shinnecock artist Courtney M. Leonard began in 2014 to explore the many meanings of the word breach. Shown in Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz, the work questions US environmental policy and economics and points to the role of industrial shipping in whale deaths.

A handmade fishing net embroidered with the eye of a humpback whale, made by artist Carolina Caycedo for Weather and the Whale at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz. The net turns the whale’s gaze back on the viewer, pointing to how commercial fishing gear entangles and kills whales while honoring small-scale subsistence fishing as a more sustainable way of living with the sea.

An immersive installation built from core elements of Sensorium for the World Ocean, the long-term project of the late environmental artist Newton Harrison (1932–2022), directed by Joshua Harrison with Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin. It premiered in 2024 at the AlloSphere, a three-story spherical research instrument in the California NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara, as a satellite to the UC Irvine Beall Center's Getty PST ART exhibition Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, and ran by reservation into April 2025. With an original spatialized composition and an interactive data world, it turns climate and ocean-health data from the Ocean Health Index of the Halpern Lab at UCSB's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management into a multisensory experience, modeling how deepwater fishing, atmospheric particulates, weather, and other natural and human forces interact to shape the ocean, along with the political, economic, and social pressures upon it. True to Harrison's intent, it aims to leave audiences with a sense of hope. A project of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure with Virtual Planet Technologies, Almost Human Media, and the AlloSphere Research Group.

A large steel sculpture by Beatriz Cortez, associate professor of art at UC Davis, commissioned for the exhibition Entangled Writing (August 8 – December 29, 2024) at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, curated by Susie Kantor. Measuring twelve by eighteen feet, the work belongs to Cortez's exploration of life across different times and possible futures, drawing on whaling history, icebergs, and a volcanic eruption in El Salvador; its title names Hansbukta, a bay on Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic. The exhibition grew from early conversations between Cortez and Los Angeles artist Phillip Byrne, and in the galleries her sculpture stood in conversation with his Before We Become Spirals, made from salvaged transoceanic cable casings, asking viewers to consider what humans leave behind.

The Los Angeles River is one of the most threatened rivers in the United States, much of it confined to a concrete channel in the name of flood control and progress. Juniper Harrower’s LA River Project draws on more than 2,000 environmental DNA experiments and long conversations with people who care for the river, an approach the artist describes as listening more than collecting. Working with museum-held specimens, Harrower took only minimal samples and imaged them under an electron microscope. Those images, gilded and drawn, wind through a 14-foot painted riverscape in which water, willow, and coyote merge into a single body. The work proposes a science practiced in relation to the river rather than through extraction, and gestures toward the rematriation movements of the Gabrielino/Tongva and Tataviam peoples. Two works from the project were shown in the Fifty-Third Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition at BAMPFA (May 10 – July 23, 2023): the painting Resting and raging through histories of containment, made with Los Angeles River water, watercolor, ink, graphite, California-sourced gold dust, and scanning electron imagery in research collaboration with CALeDNA; and Necklace for a River, a necklace made with Savannah Hunter Jewelry whose beads hold specimens of the river's animals and plants, from red-eared slider turtle and western toad to great blue heron, red willow, and Pacific salmon, strung with Los Angeles River concrete and steel beads used in DNA extraction. The necklace specimens were ethically sourced from the Norris Center for Natural History at UC Santa Cruz, with support from OpenLab and the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute.

An installation by Samuel Wildman that covers a gallery wall with nightlights, each topped with a cast porcelain flame, arranged in the pattern of a map of major California wildfires. Turning a familiar object of comfort into a warning, the work is what Wildman calls an expression of “the affective experience of climate change.” It was shown in the Fifty-Third Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition at BAMPFA (May 10 – July 23, 2023), alongside his altered tiles and soap dishes on the ties between consumption, comfort, and the policies that govern water and waste.

An augmented reality work by Tiare Ribeaux and Qianqian Ye, part of their ongoing Kai-Hai series, that imagines the remediation and restoration of water and soil at Kapūkakī (Red Hill) and Pu‘uloa (Pearl Harbor) on O‘ahu as a hopeful alternative to the story of fuel contamination. Made of digital images with 3D renders, it was shown in the Fifty-Third Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition at BAMPFA (May 10 – July 23, 2023).

A short fiction film by Tiare Ribeaux, a moving-image artist of Indigenous Hawaiian ancestry, about a weaver who slowly realizes her drinking water has been poisoned after a fuel spill at Kapūkakī (Red Hill) on O‘ahu. Drawing on Indigenous weaving and creation stories, the twelve-minute video traces the interconnectedness of water, bodies, and ancestral land. It was shown in the Fifty-Third Annual UC Berkeley Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition at BAMPFA (May 10 – July 23, 2023).

A photograph from LaToya Ruby Frazier's series Flint is Family, which documents the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, a predominantly Black city whose residents were exposed to lead-contaminated water. It shows Moses West, a retired Army captain and engineer who builds atmospheric water generators that pull drinking water from the air, holding a “Free Water” sign on North Saginaw Street. Following Flint is Family, Frazier partnered with West and AWG Contracting to bring one of his generators to Flint so residents could make their own clean water. The work is an archival pigment print on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta, 40 × 30 in. It was shown in Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer Museum, UCLA (2024–25), as an example of what scholar Rob Nixon calls slow violence.

A large-scale architectural model of a floating settlement by Vietnamese American artist Tiffany Chung, herself a political and climate refugee. Built from Plexiglas, wood veneer, plastic, aluminum, paint, steel, cable, foam, and copper wire, and measuring nearly twenty by ten feet, the work imagines vernacular stilt houses and floating communities as a way to consider forced migration and displacement caused by climate change, including projections that parts of Vietnam will be consumed by rising seas by 2050. It was shown in Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer Museum, UCLA (2024–25).

A large-scale garden installation commissioned for the Hammer Museum exhibition Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice (2024–25), the largest work in the show. South Los Angeles environmental activist Ron Finley, known as the “Gangsta Gardener,” planted a terrace outside the museum's bookstore and galleries with fruit trees, vegetables, and herbs, some growing in salvaged bathtubs and sinks, and set out about two dozen chairs for visitors. A “Redline Realty” sign recalls the housing discrimination that shaped Los Angeles neighborhoods, and plant markers carry the names of people killed by police. The work extends Finley's practice of turning neglected urban ground into food gardens as an act of community care and self-determination. After the exhibition, its soil and materials were returned to the artist.

A wallpaper pattern built from a sample of seaweeds and kelp gathered over 100 years and held in the Algae Collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Marine algae oxygenate the ocean, create habitat for other organisms, and anchor a vast marine food web; repeated across a wall, a century of collected specimens becomes an immersive record of coastal life and of the scientific care that preserved it. Digital print on archival paper, made in 2022 through The Algae Society Bio Art & Design Lab, with support from Anya Chytrowski, the UCSC Arts Research Institute, and the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center. The wallpaper was shown in CONFLUENCE: Experimentation | Installation | Collaboration at the Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina (January 28 – April 24, 2022) and Seymour Discovery Center at UC Santa Cruz (April – October 2026).

Böschl was interested in the theme of “haus.” The small icon of a Benedictine monk, symbolizing concord, sits serenely inside a simplified house form. The monk faces east, “waiting and hoping for a new day.”

Blazina’s Menagerie is a playful installation of cast hydro-cal sculptures. It explores memory through the magical forest fairy tales of a child’s imagination while questioning the identity of kitsch, suburban lawn ornaments in an unfamiliar setting.

Six rock and welded steel sculptures and a cast metal stump by Mark Baugh-Sasaki, placed around a creek on the grounds of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California. The pieces fuse man-made geometric forms with found natural objects.

Organized by curator Theo Tegelaers of TAAK Amsterdam, this fieldwork program in Marfa, Texas, was a joint project of art schools including the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam; the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem; the Cooper Union School of Art, New York; and UCLA Design Media Arts, Los Angeles.

Offered by Diane Ullman in partnership with Donna Billick. This course explores the exciting world of insects with a focus on those biological components that make them an evolutionary success and a constant in human technology, culture, architecture, literature, film and religion. Students explore these topics in a richly layered learning environment in which they create and learn with a high degree of self-initiative and collaborative interaction. Interactive lectures (2 hours/week) convey concepts and factual information and students are asked to create art from this learning experience in studios (3 hours, 1 time/week) that focus on ceramics, textile surface design and graphic communication. Student projects frequently include large-scale public installations in the UC Davis Arboretum and campus buildings that are aimed at extending student learning to the public and creating accessibility to the academic enterprise and life-long learning opportunities.

This project brings a skill set to farm workers in Watsonville in the tradition of social activist posters and WPA era graphics. It will give not only basic techniques in the screenprinting and graphic arts and social activist tradition, but also bring information and access to the resource network available to this community: health care/aid, counseling, emergency care, and access to legal assistance.

Inspired by the engkanto, an environmental spirit in Filipino folklore, this performance explores the layered ecological and colonial histories of California’s Pájaro River through movement, material practice, and speculative embodiment. Drawing on an 18th-century account by Spanish missionary Juan Crespí describing an Indigenous bird decoy sculpture found along the river, the work considers how colonial documentation and the traces of Indigenous presence continue to shape contemporary landscapes. A headdress woven from native tule grass connects the performance to the region’s ecology while reflecting on histories of habitation, displacement, and cultural memory. Through the artist’s transformation into a forest spirit, Engkanto explores shapeshifting, transness, and the possibility of relating to land as a living presence rather than a territory for exploitation.

Established in 2021 at Riverside Community Garden and expanded in 2023 at the Greenhouse Project at UC Santa Cruz, the Dye Garden explores the relationships between plants, natural pigments, artistic practice, and ecological stewardship. The garden cultivates madder, weld, woad, Japanese murasaki, and other dye-producing plants, providing materials for collective harvesting, experimentation, and natural dye workshops. Located within an intergenerational community space dedicated to art, food, and climate justice, the garden supports collaborative learning among artists, students, and community members. Through workshops, teaching, and ongoing cultivation, the project connects traditional dye knowledge with contemporary environmental art and socially engaged practice.

The project began at a diseased cornfield in Grayson, California, near where the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers meet. There, researchers were using environmental DNA (eDNA) to measure how a riparian buffer corridor, a strip of trees and shrubs planted along a waterway to filter runoff and support stream life, affects biodiversity around the industrially farmed field. In the winter of 2023, floods submerged the surrounding farmland and cut off access to the site. Residents and experts credited nearly 2,100 acres of nearby former farmland, largely restored to natural floodplain, with sparing the town from major damage. When the artists asked the river’s stewards for access to the land, they were told “There’s nothing there,” and the scientific research was put on hold. Corcoran and Horwitz turned that pause into the project’s subject: a practice of trespassing, of looking for what is present when there is supposedly nothing to see, and of letting art and science cross-contaminate. Like eDNA sampling, which reveals traces of life not visible in a single encounter, their approach works across scales. Location sound is sampled, spliced, and sequenced into a layered portrait of place. Aerial drone footage shows the rhythms of the floodplain and the marks of human-made landscapes, while high-frame-rate, long-lens photography captures life on the ground up close. The installation pairs two films as a diptych, with original scores built from location recordings and a poetic voiceover drawn from the artists’ conversations with the site. Postcards extend the project into public participation, inviting viewers to send responses back or to pass its questions on to others.

Envisioned as an outdoor gallery and living laboratory at Seacliff State Beach in California’s Monterey Bay, the S.S. Palo Alto ArtPark proposes to transform the area surrounding the historic “Cement Ship” into a space for artistic exploration and environmental education. Bringing together artists, scientists, students, and environmental organizations, the project explores connections between creative practice, marine ecology, and ocean conservation. Site-specific sculptures, interactive installations, and educational programs would engage visitors with issues including marine pollution, climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable energy. Developed through interdisciplinary collaboration with UC Santa Cruz researchers and regional marine institutions, the proposal emphasizes environmentally responsible artistic practices and public learning. ArtPark imagines how creative engagement with a changing coastal landscape can inspire environmental awareness, community participation, and collective stewardship of the ocean.

The work redesigns the final 18,000 square feet of Pico Boulevard to echo a California coastal wash, with a serpentine ramp and stairway winding through plantings that recall the wash ecologies from Mandeville Canyon to the sea. The path crosses the beach promenade and continues onto the Pico-Kentner outfall cover, where a drainshed mural maps today’s settlement pattern and inset bronze plaques depict the area’s original fauna; at its far edge, Wave Fence mirrors the outfall itself. The cover also created beach access for people with disabilities and a new public space at the intersection. Some critics argued the work aestheticized a polluting outfall, but by making visitors aware of the pollution, it helped build the public pressure that led the city to install a purification system.

The work’s nine texts and a series of mappings of California, combining drawings, satellite photos, political boundaries, water resources, irrigable land, and topography, were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1977. Around the city, the artists and San Francisco Art Institute students posted eleven street posters asking “What if all that irrigated farming isn’t necessary?”, alongside two large “Water” billboards, sidewalk chalk texts, performances, radio spots, and newspaper personal ads offering water officials advice drawn from the Buddha’s eightfold path. The project grew out of six months of research at the Berkeley Water Resources Library. A revised version was later shown at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1980.

Installation with Harvesting and Feasting. Commissioned by the Gallery at California State University, Fullerton. The work was composed of twelve 4-foot in diameter hexagonal redwood boxes, three feet deep, planted with assorted citrus trees, topped by hexagonal redwood light boxes. Because of the loss of orchard and farm to ongoing suburban and industrial development and resulting smog in the area, the work was prophesied to be the last orange orchard in Orange County. The semi-dwarf trees, lemons, lime, kumquat, several types of orange, tangerine and avocado, were chosen to see which would live and which would not, and the opening included a citrus feast. Twenty years after the opening, a number of the trees, moved outside, were still bearing fruit.

This work was designed for the Art and Technology Exhibition that was held in 1971 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It took an entirely different direction from the work inside that, with few exceptions, was evolved from electronic technologies of one kind or another. This was a late addition to the exhibition, done as an entry piece at a cost of approximately $800. The Harrisons' other work in the exhibition cost approximately $50,000. The reason was simple; as opposed to electricity, the sun was the engine. For this work, a low, waterproof wooden structure was composed of four ten foot by twenty foot by eight-inch deep containers. Each “pond” was filled with water of a different salinity from seawater to brine ten times saltier than seawater (the white pond). The algae, Dunaliella, which produces carotene as a response to increasing salinity, was introduced into each of the four ponds. The box then became a three-dimensional color field painting going from blue-green to dark yellowish-green to brick red to white. At this point, the brine shrimp, Artemia, were introduced. As they ate the algae, the color continually changed. This work was one of the simplest discrete ecosystems extant, as only the brine shrimp and the algae can exist under these extreme conditions. At maximum production, scaled up, the piece produces about 18,000 pounds wet weight an acre.