From The Ground Up: Nuturing Diversity In Hostile Enviroments
What happens when populations that depend on international supply chains for basic needs are systemically cut off from food production? And when power grids fail, and reservoirs dry up? For decades, artists, writers, and scientists have imagined the consequences of severe disruptions to the economy and the environment. Taking inspiration from the seed—one of the smallest but most powerful mechanisms for change—From the Ground Up presents works by 17 contemporary artists who confront the specter of global environmental disaster and disruptions in food production. The artists also explore technology, histories of contested spaces, and Indigenous understandings of nature as they imagine alternative, sustainable futures and issue calls to action. The exhibition looks at the ways art and science can work together to encourage sustainable food and shelter using traditional environmental management techniques that stand in contrast to industrialized corporate farming.
This exhibition is presented as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide. Southern California’s landmark arts event, Pacific Standard Time, returns in September 2024, presenting more than 50 exhibitions from organizations across the region, all exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART: Art & Science Collide follows Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (September 2017–January 2018) and Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 (October 2011– March 2012). PST ART is a Getty initiative. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit: pst.art.
About the Team
The Project Director/Principal Investigator is Irene Georgia Tsatsos, Director of Exhibition Programs/Chief Curator at Armory Center for the Arts. She will oversee the project’s production, working closely with Heber Rodriguez, the Armory’s Exhibition Program Production Manager, and in partnership with three researchers:
Enid Baxter Ryce is an artist, filmmaker, musician, and Professor of Cinematic Arts and Environmental Studies and Director of the California State University Monterey Bay Salinas Center for Arts and Culture, where she is responsible for all exhibitions and related programs;
Olivia Chumacero is an artist, author, poet, filmmaker, educator, First Nation being of the Americas, and founder of everything is medicine, which uses workshops, hikes, and other initiatives to raise awareness of native California flora, sustainable water use, and the respectful use of lands belonging to indigenous groups;
David Delgado Shorter, Ph.D. is an author, filmmaker, archivist, Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles, and Gendai Reiki Master.
Their work will be supported by a team of advisors, including:
Sandra de la Loza, a multi-media artist and activist who creates research-based frameworks to explore visual, experimental, social, and pedagogical inquiries;
Sean Lahmeyer, Collections and Conservation Manager and Curator of The Herbarium at The Huntington Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA;
Hillary Mushkin, artist and Research Professor of Art and Design at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and founder of Incendiary Traces, an art, research, and media initiative, to reverse-engineer the politics of landscape visualization;
Sandy Rodriguez, artist and educator who created the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, an ongoing project begun in 2017 that consists of botanical illustrations and large-scale maps of California and northern Mexico.
The researchers and advisors on this project are multi-disciplinary: some are rooted in traditional practices, others in hard sciences, some in visual art, and others in social sciences. Some share overlapping disciplines, and all engage in rigorous research, community dialogue, and education. Collectively, the members of this team ask how ancient modalities and knowledges, held in community and transmitted orally, along with industrial techniques developed in privately owned labs, can inform a future faced with diminished resources.