No matter how high the thermometer climbs in L.A., Ron Finley never fills his backyard swimming pool with water. The fashion designer turned artist and urban gardener—he’s famous for an early TED Talk warning that “drive-throughs are killing more people than drive-bys”—instead keeps his pool filled with a wide variety of potted plants, which have their own cooling effect. There are mulberry and mango trees, succulents and herbs, alongside signs proclaiming integrity and power, making for a lush case study in how to grow food in unused spaces.
These days, another, more politically pointed version of Finley’s urban garden is growing at the Hammer Museum. Toward the front stands a large wooden sign from “Redline Realty” blasting the history of white land grabs: su casa es mi casa! Deeper in, plant markers in the soil bear the names of Amadou Diallo, Sonya Massey, and other Black victims of police violence. Then there are fruit trees and vegetable patches with lettuce, corn, squash, and an abundance of herbs, some in salvaged bathtubs or sinks, with two dozen chairs mixed in. This community garden is clearly a space of protest and mourning. “But there’s also joy, refuge, peace, and calm; and the number one thing is beauty, which should be everywhere, ’cause beauty doesn’t cost no more than ugly does,” says Finley, who has a griot’s gift for aphorism.
Beatriz Cortez, Generosity I, 2019, installed by the Los Angeles River.
Tatiana Guerrero, courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council.
The largest artwork in the Hammer Museum exhibition “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice,” Finley’s garden is located, for space and pest-control reasons, on a terrace just outside the galleries. But in the past three years, museums like the Hammer are increasingly showing living plants, soil, and seeds inside their exhibition spaces as well, as contemporary artists are making art out of plant matter with a strong sense of environmental urgency.
Small, sunny fields of wheatgrass are now sprouting from Leslie Labowitz Starus’s installation at the Brick, in East Hollywood, as part of its show “Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism.” At the Armory Center for the Arts, in Pasadena, there’s an isolated but stubbornly rooted prickly pear cactus growing from a yellow wheelbarrow sculpture by Vick Quezada in “From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments.” And look up and you’ll see, suspended from the ceiling, a Sputnik-like steel sculpture by Beatriz Cortez in which small nodules on the metal surface carry seeds of indigenous Mesoamerican plants like corn, beans, quinoa, and amaranth, which she sees as a gift of know-how or technology from the past.
These shows are part of this season’s Getty Museum–funded “PST Art: Art & Science Collide” exhibition extravaganza in L.A. But tendrils are sprouting in New York museums too. The Whitney Museum of American Art currently has one of Rashid Johnson’s signature potted-plant installations bisecting its facade: a large steel shelving system thrumming with life thanks to all kinds of houseplants in his handmade ceramics, alongside domestic items such as chunks of shea butter and books of poetry. Upstairs, on the eighth floor, is Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard, a field of 18 citrus trees by the late wife-and-husband artist team of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, the environmental art pioneers whose work on sustainable farming is finally getting national attention.
Maria Maea, in her home studio in Los Angeles, with (from left) Mother Ditch (work in progress), 2024; La Chata, 2020; and Fa’avavau Lē Gata, 2023. Dior blouse and skirt; her own jewelry.
As different as all of these artists are, they tend to see art-making as akin to gardening: a way of tending to their environment and nourishing people. They’re drawn to works that are not static but dynamic, growing, evolving, even failing and decomposing. And many are exploring our outsize role in an ecosystem on the brink of climate disaster.
“Conversations about decentering humans in the era of the Anthropocene are definitely more prevalent, and working with plants as a stand-in for nature has become very relevant,” says the artist Glenn Kaino, who cocurated “Breath(e)” for the Hammer and created his own immersive eco-art installation, A Forest for the Trees, in 2022. Irene Georgia Tsatsos, who curated the Armory show, says her exhibition grew from her noticing how many visual artists today are creating plant-based dyes, growing foods, or cultivating community. “It’s very different making art using a material like seeds and plants rather than outsourcing the fabrication of an object,” she says. “There is something really primal in it—and pleasurable. Researchers tell us there is an increase in endorphins when we put our hands in dirt.”
Some of this art-making took root during the pandemic, which fueled a gardening boom while also exposing the failure of U.S. public health agencies and social services, especially for people of color. “What do we do when the power goes out?” asks Tsatsos. “I’m interested less in an isolated prepper mentality and more in the question of how we can share skills in an anti-capitalist way.” Or, as Finley says, “Gardening is a life skill, right there with breathing. If you can’t feed yourself, you can’t free yourself.”
Leslie Labowitz Starus, Women Reclaim the Earth, 1979.
Courtesy of Leslie Labowitz Starus
The movement has a strong 1970s vibe, whether or not younger artists today acknowledge it. That was the decade, after all, when environmental activism led to the creation of the EPA and related legislation, and feminism also made serious public policy gains. The two movements came together in the form of ecofeminism, as theorists found parallels between the exploitation of natural resources and the oppression of women under patriarchy.
One goal for ecofeminist artists was to find ways to respect or empower Mother Nature. “At that time, you could see land artists, both female and male, imprinting themselves on land, imposing their will on the land, but ecofeminist artists made a real decision to work with the land and living ecosystems,” says Catherine Taft, who curated the show for the Brick. She believes that even today, with art galleries and museums serving as prominent platforms for activist endeavors, the ecofeminist sensibility prizes “working with community and with the real world.”
Labowitz Starus, for example, has been in the public sphere for decades. She first made her name in the L.A. art world of the ’70s with wrenching feminist performances on issues such as rape and incest. But by the end of the decade, she was emotionally spent. She shifted to growing organic sprouts and greens in her backyard—a way to feed both her community and her public art practice. This led to her longtime stand at the Santa Monica Farmers Market and to her starting an agricultural business that, by the time of its sale, in 2011, grew 20 varieties of sprouts and employed 60 people.
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Hog Pasture: Survival Piece #1, 1970–71; the Harrisons at the MoCA exhibition “Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974,” in 2012, with a pig named Wilma.
Courtesy of the Artists and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles/Dallas/Seoul
Looking back now, Labowitz Starus believes it all came from the same creative impulse. She calls her early food-sharing happenings, her farmers market stand, her business, and her new art installation “Sproutime,” as if it were a single, lifelong performance. “I never stopped thinking of myself as an artist,” says Labowitz Starus, whose Brick installation features trays of wheatgrass and buckets of soil holding up anti-war, pro-environment signs. She sees the wheatgrass in this setting as a source of “light and energy” to balance the protest messages. “Who wants to hear that your soil, your earth, is being destroyed by war? We don’t even want to look at the news, it’s such overstimulation. I just want to bring some light into the world right now.”
In this way, plants can literally provide a breath of fresh air while also generating a range of metaphors or symbols. For some artists, working with greenery can offer a way to connect to one’s ancestry, as is the case with Maria Maea, a self-taught weaver whose pieces with palm fronds nod to her Samoan and Mexican heritage, and Miller Robinson, an Indigenous (Karuk, Yurok, and mixed European) artist who works with acorns. Both of them were in the Hammer’s “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living” biennial.
Plants can also serve as stand-ins for people who are vulnerable or displaced. Beatriz Cortez, the El Salvador–born California transplant who created the Sputnik-like sculpture, likens seeds to migrants, both because of their displacement at the hands of big agribusiness and because of the role they often play in an immigrant’s experience. “Immigrants carry plants all the time. We put seeds in our socks in our suitcases so we can re-create our environment wherever we go, so we can feel at home again,” she says. “It wasn’t that plants became important when I began making sculpture. Plants were always important in my survival and feeling joy.”
Rashid Johnson, Fatherhood, 2015, at Hauser & Wirth, New York.
Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth
This kind of art can also represent a dramatic alternative to—or even rebellion against—the art market, with its painting obsession. Just try stashing an artwork made with living or decaying plants in a Geneva free port. A sculpture made with organic matter is pretty much the opposite of a blue-chip Picasso, which can circulate like currency. And it’s easy to see how these artworks would pose a host of conservation and maintenance challenges for museums. Of most concern: attracting insects and rodents that could infest other artworks or make for unsanitary working conditions. Taft, at the Brick, vividly remembers the challenges—and overwhelming smells—from the showing of an artwork in 2017 that used live banana plants, as the fruit began to rot and attract flies. This time, she and Labowitz Starus decided to exhibit buckets of soil without the composting worms.
For the most recent “Made in L.A.” biennial at the Hammer, Maea had to submit seeds and plants to the museum several weeks in advance of her installation, so they could be quarantined and deoxygenated before being shown in the galleries. And when the Hammer acquired one of her large-scale, plant-based assemblages, All in Time, a maternal figure wearing a crown of fresh marigolds, she and the registrar spoke in depth about the future of the artwork and its flowers, which contain seeds that might or might not be viable down the road. “We had radical conversations about logistics versus poetics,” says Maea. “We talked about the longevity of the seeds and what the museum is willing to commit to in the long term when continuing—or propagating—this work.”
For Maea and others, the unruliness of plants is part of their appeal: They are unpredictable collaborators. That’s also how the L.A. artist Sam Shoemaker, now in a show at the California African American Museum inspired by artist-scientist George Washington Carver, describes his highly experimental work with mushrooms, which he typically cultivates over many months in ceramic vessels he has built. In the end, the mushroom-ceramic combo is the sculpture.
Sam Shoemaker in his Los Angeles studio with (on wall, from left) Dog Walker, 2021; Walking on the Phone, 2021; and various samples of dried Ganoderma mushrooms and material test samples. Herno jacket and pants; Dior Men shoes; his own T-shirt.
The collaboration starts in his basement lab when he introduces mycelium into a nutrient-rich sawdust mixture in his vessel so it can grow. Within a few weeks, he moves it into a brightly lit, super-humid, climate-controlled tent he uses as a fruiting chamber. He tends to the mushrooms at this stage on a daily basis, whether it’s adjusting his equipment to bring in more fresh air or filtering out extraneous spores. “You develop this wordless relationship where you can actually read the behavior of the mushroom,” he says, noting that even fungi from the same species can behave very differently. “They’re like your kids. That one is the teacher’s pet and will outperform and ham it up a little. Watch out for that one—that one will throw a tantrum.” Finally, when the mushroom is done growing, Shoemaker dries it out and might shellac it before display. It makes for a time-based sculptural process that, like the bio-art of Pierre Huyghe or Anicka Yi, is ultimately beyond the artist’s control—somewhere between the Romantic ideal of artist as master-creator, like Rodin with a lump of clay, and the hands-off model of John Cage tossing coins and consulting the I-Ching to compose music.
As for Finley’s museum garden, it’s also bearing fruit in both expected and unexpected ways. Along with producing some apples here or pomegranates there, it’s bringing people together for workshops on topics like making natural dyes, led by collaborators he’s invited. Others show up just to unwind. He says he’d like the garden to be its own ecosystem, “like a forest where it’s maintaining itself,” but that doesn’t work so well in an urban setting. The Hammer has a specialist tending to it, and Finley visits too, to check in and lend a hand. “It’s not like most of the art you see in museums,” he says. “It needs the gardener’s shadow.”
RON FINLEY: Grooming by Alexa Hernandez for Tom Ford Beauty at The Wall Group. MARIA MAEA: Hair by Ramón Garcia for Authentic Beauty Concept at The Visionaries; Makeup by Laura Bueno. SAM SHOEMAKER: Grooming by Laura Bueno; Photo Assistant for Finley: Morganne Boulden; Photo Assistant for Maea and shoemaker: Michael Irwin.
