In partnership with:
The Brick - Los Angeles
Alternative Space LOOP - Seoul, Korea
WEST - The Hague, The Netherlands
March 21st, 2025 around the world
Art Center College of Design
Flex Space at 950 S. Raymond Ave.
11:00am
Welcome & Introduction
Jane McFadden, art historian and ArtCenter Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Catherine Taft, ArtCenter faculty member, alumna and Deputy Director of The Brick.
11:10am - 12:00pm
Silvia Federici in conversation with artist Ohan Breiding and curator Shoghig Halajian
12:00pm - 2:00pm
colectivo amasijo: A Circular Offering co-presented with Active Cultures
Mexico City-based artists Carmen Serra and Marina Manterola will lead participants through a performative ritual for the equinox, following the milpa cycle of agriculture and connecting it to the Three Sisters method of planting, harvesting, and creating food.
The performance will culminate with an offering of tamales by Fátima Juárez of Komal
This is a ticketed event. All symposium participants without a ticket are welcome to watch the event, but the food portion has reached its capacity. Some nearby lunch suggestions include:
2:00pm - 3:30pm
HISTORIES - moderated by Jane McFadden
Jane Chin Davidson, art historian
Leslie Labowitz, artist
Janet Sarbanes, author and scholar
Diana Thater, artist
with colectivo amasijo’s Carmen Serra and Martina Manterola
3:30 - 4:00
Break
4:00pm – 5:30pm
FUTURES - moderated by Catherine Taft
Maru Garcia, artist
David Horvitz, artist
yétúndé ọlágbajú, artist, researcher, and cultural producer
Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez, curator and researcher
Leah Thomas, author and activist
6:00pm
SCREENINGS & RECEPTION
Ohan Breiding and Shoghig Halajian, The Rebel Body, 2019, 29 min, 44 sec
Institute for Queer Ecology, Metamorphosis Parts 1-3, 2020, 48 min
PARTICIPANT BIOS
Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, writer, and teacher. In 1972 she was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organisation that launched the Wages For Housework campaign internationally. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalisation movement and the U.S. anti-death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organisation dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and educational systems. From 1987 to 2005 she taught international studies, women studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalisation and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons. Her most recent volumes are Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women (2018), Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018) and the revised and expanded Revolution Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (2020).
Ohan Breiding works with drawing, photography, photographic and filmic archives, video and collaboration, and employs a trans-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care by amplifying landscapes as witness. In doing so, Ohan’s work aims to remember the forgotten, as they relate to the systemic failures and violence of the Anthropocene. Projects include The Rebel Body (2019), which takes the murder of Anna Göldi (1782), the last person to be executed for witchcraft in Europe, as its point of departure and is made in collaboration with Shoghig Halajian and with the participation of Marxist-Feminist writer Silvia Federici. Souvenir (2023), also in collaboration with Shoghig Halajian, continues to explore memory as a site of reparative politics, focusing on the personal, material, and political aftermath of oceanic hazards through the memories of Ohan’s family member who survived a tsunami while snorkeling and weaves together this re-telling with the longest studied migration of marine species via plastic debris. Belly of a Glacier is an experimental documentary and photographic project that braids an ancient ice archive with a community-initiated project that insulates the Rhône Glacier from rising temperatures with a queer, speculative glacier funeral.
Shoghig Halajian is a curator and researcher based in Los Angeles. Her curatorial work and writings focus on queer and feminist histories, the photographic archive, institutional critique through a critical race and gender studies lens. She is co-editor of Georgia, an online journal in collaboration with Anthony Carfello and Suzy Halajian, and serves on the Board of Directors at Human Resources LA. From 2013-2016, Halajian was Assistant Director at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Recent curatorial projects include: A grammar built with rocks (co-curated with Suzy Halajian) at Human Resources LA, One Archives at the USC Libraries, and Redcat, 2018; At night the states (co-curated with Suzy Halajian) at Hammer Museum, 2017; DISSENT: what they fear is the light (co-curated with Thomas Lawson), LACE, 2016; Jibade-Khalil Huffman: Verse Chorus Verse, LACE, 2016; Rafa Esparza: I have never been here before, LACE, 2015; and The Whole World is Watching, Le Magasin (co-curated with Corrado Salzano and Sarah Sandler) at Centre National d'Art Contemporain, 2012. She holds a MA from CalArt’s Critical Studies: Aesthetics and Politics program and a BA in English Literature with minors in Women's Studies and Philosophy from UCLA. She was a curatorial fellow at Ecole du Magasin in 2011.
Diana Thater is a Los Angeles–based artist Diana Thater who has pioneered the use of film, video, light, and sound, continually challenging the boundaries of time-based media and installation art. Her work explores the relationship between the natural and man-made worlds while critically examining the structures of mediated reality. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior sciences, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative works directly engage their surroundings, producing an intricate relationship between time and space.
Born in San Francisco, Thater studied Art History at New York University, before receiving her MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. Diana Thater is also a prolific writer, educator, and curator. She lives and works in Los Angeles and is the Chair of Art at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, where she has taught for the past 30 years.
Jane Chin Davidson is an art historian/curator whose research focuses on transnationalism in relation to Chinese identity, feminism/ ecofeminism, performance/performativity, and global exhibitions of contemporary art. Her recent publications include the forthcoming Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023) co-edited with Amelia Jones, the monograph Staging Art and Chineseness: Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions (University of Manchester Press, 2020) and the co-edited volume Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum (Routledge, 2017). Chin Davidson was awarded top honors with the Distinguished PhD Postgraduate at the University of Manchester, a British ESRC Fellowship at the Cultural Theory Institute, and a Getty Research Institute Postgraduate Fellowship. In addition to her monographs, edited books, and peer reviewed journals, such as the Case Studies in the Environment (2022) she contributes to Hyperallergic and to other art criticism.
Leslie Labowitz Starus is a Los Angeles-based artist whose earliest feminist performances were created while attending Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where she received her MFA in 1972. That same year, Labowitz Starus was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to travel to Germany to attend the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf where Joseph Beuys was a mentor. At that time, Labowitz Starus also co-founded a women’s video group with artist Ulrike Rosenbach. When she lived in Europe, she also taught performance at Bonn University 1973-75 and art at the University of Maryland campuses in Rota, Spain 1975-76 and Nueremberg, Germany 1976-77.
Labowitz Starus initiated SPROUTIME in 1980, an ongoing, art/life practice and ecofeminist project that spans four decades. Integrating personal and global survival into performances and installations, she started SPROUTIME by growing organic sprouts and greens, creating a micro-urban farm in her yard in Venice, California. This was followed by a series of ecologically motivated performances and installations produced in galleries across the United States. As an outgrowth of these art installations, Labowitz Starus started her business enterprise (also called Sproutime) in 1980. Ultimately, she built a green art/life business growing and distributing organic food throughout the US until 2011 and maintains her sprout stand in the Santa Monica Farmers Market as her ongoing legacy. The nurturing and healing aspects of SPROUTIME counteracts Labowitz Starus’s experience growing up with intergenerational trauma as a child of a holocaust survivor. Today, she continues to mine her artistic and family archives, integrating the personal and the political in her ongoing environmental social practice.
Janet Sarbanes is the author of a work of hybrid theory, Letters on the Autonomy Project (punctum books), and two short story collections: Army of One (Otis Books), and The Protester Has Been Released (C & R Press), which was declared a best fiction book of 2017 by Entropy magazine.The recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation art writer’s grant, she has published art writing and cultural criticism in numerous journals, anthologies,and museum catalogues. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program and the MA in Aesthetics and Politics at CalArts.
Maru García is a Mexican, LA-based artist/chemist working across art + science + environment. Her methodology combines laboratory and fieldwork tools from her background in plant chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry. Her use of media includes research, installations, performance, sculpture, and video, usually with the presence of organic matter to help understand the biological processes occurring in complex systems. Her areas of interest are biosystems, multispecies relations, and the capacity of living organisms (including humans) to act as remediators in contaminated sites. Her work highlights the importance of eco-aesthetics, in which relations are proposed as ways of building cultures of regeneration. At the same time, she questions the ways science and technology have influenced humans and more-than-humans within the natural world.
Garcia has participated in conferences, solo and group exhibitions in North America, Europe, and Asia. She was an artist in residence in the National Center of Genetic Resources in Mexico and has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts ‘Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Art Grant’, the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) Environmental Justice Grant, the California Arts Council, Los Angeles Sustainability Collaborative, Clifton Webb Scholarship for the Arts, and Fundación Jumex. She was a 2020- 2021 Sci-Art Ambassador for Supercollider and worked at the Getty Research Institute in the 2019-2020 Scholar program titled “Art and Ecology.” Maru was a 2021-2022 artist in residence at 18th Street Arts Center and is a fellow at Metabolic Studio 2023- 2024.
David Horvitz was born in Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works. He studied at the University of California and at the Waseda University in Tokyo. He obtained a MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, in 2010.Witty and poetic, the work of David Horvitz meddles with systems of language, time and networks. Eschewing categorization, his expansive, nomadic body of work traverses the forms of photographs, artist books, performances, the Internet, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, and natural environments. His work examines questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing these distances. Using image, text and objects, his works circulate and operate independently of himself, penetrating ever more effectively the intimate sphere. When encountering his works– in the postal system, libraries, or the airport lost-and-found services– our attention to the infinitesimal, inherent loopholes and alternative logics, and the imaginary comes to the fore. Like lullabies impressed upon our minds, Horvitz deploys art as both objects of contemplation and as viral or systemic tools to affect change on a personal scale. Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real.
yétúndé ọlágbajú is a research-based artist, creative producer, and cultural strategist living on Ohlone and Tataviam lands (Bay Area & Los Angeles, CA). Their work roots in a single question: What must we reckon with as we build a future, together?
With no set answers or expectations, ọlágbajú unravels intricate connections as a means of highlighting our interdependence. They are interested in how our familial, platonic, romantic, and ecological bonds are transformed by what we confront in the reckoning. They hold an MFA from Mills College and are the recipient of multiple awards including a Foundation for Contemporary Arts award and a Headlands Center for the Arts fellowship. They recently became an advisor for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s, Shaping Legacy’s Artist Circle [San Francisco, CA] and participated in Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism at The Brick [Los Angeles, CA]. They are a co-director at Level Ground [Los Angeles] and consult as a cultural organizing strategist, facilitator, and creative producer.
Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez is a curator, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of art and ecology. She is the founder and director of the Green Art Lab Alliance (established in 2012); a network comprising seventy art organizations across Europe, Latin America, the United States, Canada and Asia and of the Future Materials Bank; a crowd-sourced database of sustainable materials for artists, designers and architects. The mission of both is to foster relationships and knowledge exchange that contributes to social and environmental justice, akin to the interconnected nature of mycelium. She is a self-proclaimed mycophile, interested in exploring the application of a mycological lens in defining fair models of collaboration and (self) organization. Her debut book, Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts, came out in 2023 and is being translated in over five languages. After a year long of conducting workshops based on the book, all the learnings and further thoughts were brought together in a deck of Oracle Cards, weaving together Yasmine’s many encounters from fungi-enthusiasts in Asia, Latin-America, Europe and the Caribbean.
Leah Thomas is a celebrated environmentalist based in Los Angeles. Coining the term “eco-communicator” to describe her style of environmentalism, Leah uses her passion for writing and creativity to explore and advocate for the critical yet often overlooked relationship between social justice and environmentalism. Her work includes brand consulting and working with brands such as Patagonia, Teva, KEEN, and more, and she has been a presenter at Apple, Google 1% for the Planet’s Global Summit, Meta, Dramforce, UCLA, and now Art Center. She is the author of The Intersectional Environmentalist, a best selling 2022 book, and has contributed to Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Teen Vogue, and the Washington Post, and has been featured in Harpers Bazaar, W, CNN, NBC, ABC News, The Weather channel, and more. Leah has been named to several notable lists, including Forbes 30 under 30 2024, Time100 NEXT, INSIDER’s Climate Action 30, Marie Claire’s Creators to Watch, EBONY Power 100, and InStyle’s The Badass 50.
ORGANIZERS AND PARTNERS
Founded in 1930 and located in Pasadena, California, ArtCenter College of Design is a global leader in art and design education. ArtCenter offers 11 undergraduate and seven graduate degrees in a wide variety of industrial design disciplines as well as visual and applied arts. Renowned for both its ties to industry and its social impact initiatives, ArtCenter is the first design school to receive the United Nations’ Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) status. Throughout the College’s long and storied history, ArtCenter alumni have had a profound impact on popular culture, the way we live and important issues in our society.
The Brick is a nonprofit visual art space in Los Angeles that promotes developments in contemporary culture through exhibitions, publications, and public programs. With the belief that contemporary art is a means of understanding key issues of our time with all their inherent contradictions, The Brick provides a range of offerings that contextualize contemporary art both socially and art historically. The Brick was founded in 2004–originally named LAXART–as a platform for emerging and under-recognized artistic talent. Since that time, we have realized over 400 projects, characterized by newly commissioned artworks and solo projects in both our gallery and in public spaces. Our programs are free and designed to be accessible to the general public.
West Den Haag is a national art institute in the heart of the Hague Museum Quarter. We focus on the most relevant international developments in the field of visual arts. The aim is to present contemporary art and to question how art has an impact on society. With a challenging programme of exhibitions, symposia, an extensive education programme, a music programme, artist talks and collaborations with organisations at home and abroad, we focus on a broad audience. The power of art is central to this. West Den Haag is located in the former American embassy, a national monument by architect Marcel Breuer that has been made available to West Den Haag by the municipality of The Hague.
LOOP opened its doors in 1999 in the Hongdae area of Seoul as Korea’s first ‘alternative space,’ with the firm belief that contemporary arts and culture have inherent, fundamental roles within an open civil society. To further solidarity, access, and sharing in art, LOOP has supported and promoted experimental artists who have built up particular aesthetics and practices that address contemporary social issues; shared current international artistic movements with the public via exchanges with artists from diverse locations; and focused on the point(s) at which the social, cultural, and artistic issues proposed by artists intersect and meet with the audience.
Active Cultures is a public arts nonprofit in Los Angeles that explores the intersection of art, food, and ecologies through artist-led projects and programs. Throughout our programming, our purpose is to expand our assumptions around foodways, making creative spaces for gathering and shared experience, and to enrich our political, cultural, and sensorial relationships to food. Since our founding in 2018, AC has supported interdisciplinary practices by artists who consider hospitality an empowering gesture; who privilege community-building; and who work to make visible the critical stakes of cultural production, representation, and consumption.
This symposium is co-organized by Jane McFadden, ArtCenter Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Catherine Taft, Deputy Director & Curator at The Brick on the occasion of the exhibition Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism, and McFadden and Taft’s forthcoming book of the same title, to be released in fall 2025.
Lead support for Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism was provided by Getty and PST ART: Art & Science Collide, with additional generous support by the Margaret Morgan and Wesley Phoa Fund, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Knox Foundation, the Hillenburg Family Foundation, Teiger Foundation, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, and the Wilhelm Family Foundation. Special thanks to Art Center College of Design, Active Cultures, and Kameron McDowell of The Brick.