“Belonging to Soil” is opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland this Friday, January 30! This is my collaborative virtual reality art installation – with Shadrick Addy, JT Thrash, Mayen McClain, Luke Stephens, Josh Rodenberg, Will Yuan, Andrew Sanchez, and Megan Wright, and live springtails!

This group show brings together artists across Ohio who focus on sustainability, agriculture, food justice, and natural ecologies. Through diverse materials and perspectives, these artists reflect on humanity’s relationship with the environment. Some incorporate found elements like waterway pollutants, plant-based dyes, and grass clippings, while others investigate topics ranging from climate change conspiracies to natural history and arthropods. Many draw directly from personal experiences as farmers, grocery workers, or environmental observers. Spanning painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, installation, and community-based practice, the works in this exhibition highlight the urgency of environmental issues while inviting dialogue and response.

Curated by Theresa Bembnister, DJ Hellerman, Megan Lykins Reich, and Christina Vassallo. Co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH and Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, OH.

It really is a great exhibition, with artworks by: Catherine Clements, Avery Mags Duff, Myles Dunigan, Tina Gutierrez, Brian Harnetty, Desert Kitchen Collective: Glenna Jennings, Jalisa Robinson & Friends, Keith Lemley, Celeste Malvar-Stewart, Lori Nix & Kathleen Gerber, Elena Osterwalder, Praxis Fiber Workshop, John Sabraw, Charmaine Spencer, and Supermrin.

This show brings together artists across Ohio who focus on sustainability, agriculture, food justice, and natural ecologies. Through diverse materials and perspectives, these artists reflect on humanity’s relationship with the environment. Some incorporate found elements like waterway pollutants, plant-based dyes, and grass clippings, while others investigate topics ranging from climate change conspiracies to natural history and arthropods. Many draw directly from personal experiences as farmers, grocery workers, or environmental observers. Spanning painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, installation, and community-based practice, the works in this exhibition highlight the urgency of environmental issues while inviting dialogue and response.

Curated by Theresa Bembnister, DJ Hellerman, Megan Lykins Reich, and Christina Vassallo. Co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH and Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, OH.

The other artists in this exhibition: Catherine Clements (Bowling Green), Avery Mags Duff (Akron), Myles Dunigan (Oberlin), Tina Gutierrez (Cincinnati), Brian Harnetty (Columbus), Desert Kitchen Collective: Glenna Jennings, Jalisa Robinson & Friends (Dayton), Keith Lemley (Ravenna), Celeste Malvar-Stewart (Columbus), Lori Nix & Kathleen Gerber (Cleveland), Elena Osterwalder (Columbus), Praxis Fiber Workshop (Cleveland), John Sabraw (Athens), Charmaine Spencer (Cleveland), and Supermrin (Cincinnati).

Go check it out! https://www.contemporaryartscenter.org/experience/exhibitions/2025/05/ohio-now-state-of-nature

An event for people to drink tea and consider what we can learn from the billions of soil organisms who co-create the healthy conditions for plants to grow in – and in turn, nourish us. Tea is a plant, after all. After drinking, we fed our used teabags and paper cups back into the wormbin ecosystem. While it might seem strange to have tea with worms, springtails, mites, and billions of microscopic organisms, we are always having tea with them.

We discussed what we can learn from worm bin ecosystems. For instance, they show us the undigestable microplastics hidden in teabags – and they show us how our food and paper waste can be turned into valuable nutrients for gardens and indoor plants. Worm composting does not create unpleasant odors and does not produce methane, a greenhouse gas which is generated by food waste that rots in landfills.

For this event, we drank loose-leaf tea scooped into strainers or into small paper pouches. I’ve learned from the worms that some commercial tea bags are made of plastic, even those that really look like paper. Worms can’t eat it, soil doesn’t need it, and studies show that plants take microplastics up into their bodies. This is a problem for them and for animals like us, who eat plants.

Thousands of composting worms and arthropods and billions of microbes live inside this worm-shaped wagon. They are making rich compost from waste generated from my home, such as cardboard, wilted lettuce, banana peels, apple cores, dead plants, tea bags and used coffee grounds. This composting ecosystem includes a colony of red-wiggler worms (Eisenia Fetida), who have lived with me for thirty years. We have shared many meals. The fertilizer they make is fed to my houseplants, herbs, tomato plants, and lettuces. To publicly celebrate soil critters, I have mobilized my worm bin onto a wagon. Worms do their business in the dark; they do not announce to us that they offer solutions to climate change and they do not speak about their important role in circulating nutrients and healthy microbes in soils. I’m sharing this on their behalf because I hope other households will develop regenerative relationships with composting worms. Sharing nutrients with household worm ecosystem is a slow, steady way to reconnect one’s sense of self within the larger web of life.

The recycling of old into new is also how I approached making Mobile Soil Maker, this “Worm Wagon” ecosystem sculpture. I made it from the remnants of an old artwork, rather than using all new materials. You can see the original installation from 2004, Intraterrestrial Soundings.

Opening webinar event
November 12, 2020, 12:00–1:00pm PST (3:00-4:00pm EST)
Register for Zoom link here

My new project, Vegetal Entangling is a multimedia webpage love-letter to plants. It reflects on human-plant relationships and documents my practice of “plant noticing”. This exhibition, which asks, What Makes Us Human? provides a great context for my project:

Some of the inquiry conducted by these collaborators examines what it means to be something other than human, simultaneously helping reveal what makes us human. How do we talk about our humanness? Which of our taxonomies intersect? And how can (virtual) space facilitate more of these intersections? How are humans furthering creative, scientific, and scholarly research while responding to the pandemic in our institutions, in our bodies, in our environments and in our communities? How can researchers be alone together and work collectively — questioning, testing, and collaborating during COVID to educate communities at the intersection of art, culture, science, and politics? 

Curated by Jennifer Parker, artist and professor of Art and Digital Arts & New Media at the University of California Santa Cruz, this exhibition showcases the multifaceted approach of artists, humanists, and scientists working across disciplines to investigate art and genetics. Spearheaded by OpenLab Collaborative Research Center in collaboration with the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery in the Arts Division, UC Santa Cruz.

Collaborators:
A.M. Darke, Alexa Burrell, Amy Youngs, Angélica Dass, ASSIST Lab, Avital Meshi, Brad Necyk, Center for Public Philosophy, Danielle Siembieda, Dorothy Santos, Enrique Leal, the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, Gina Czarnecki, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Jenny Reardon, Jessie Kendall-Bar, Karolina Karlic, OpenLab Collaborative Research Center, UC Santa Barbara Gaucho OpenLab Initiative, Paloma Medina, Phylum (Carlos Castellanos, Johnny DiBlasi, Bello Bello), The Algae Society, The Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History, UCSC Astrobiology, UCSC Earth Futures Initiatives, UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Zac Zimmer, Zach Corse

Can we break away from current agricultural practices which are intimately connected to desertification, water and soil pollution, antibiotic resistance, climate change and social and economic inequalities? In a two-hour discussion we are interested in considering a sustainable, multispecies perspective to farming, which could start in the soil and progress through thinking about the multiple ways we can consider food. Aquaponics, vertical farming, worms, soldier flies, and permaculture offer real solutions, where food is grown while respecting living beings, and the intertwined ecologies that support them.Humane food can be grown in urban or rural communities, though the soil is critical. How can we learn and care about living beings we cannot quickly know or see? What is care like in practice? We are also interested in exploring the concept of “citizen eco-artist” as so much of what we do resides in the spaces between actual science, sustainable practice and speculative fiction.

• This international talk with be livestreamed on youtube and recorded for later viewing.
  
• A coproduction of the Network for Prototyping the Future and Art Laboratory Berlin

There are 8 scenes which place at Willow Lake, on the South end of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, in New York. The starting point for the app tour is the East entrance of the Pat Dolan Trail, right after walking over the Van Wyck Expressway pedestrian bridge. The tour takes about 26 minutes and the one-way walk down the trail is less than a mile. You can also use the app in your local park, GPS is not required.

This artwork is a guided tour which allows us to inhabit the worlds of multiple species along an urban park trail, allowing them to become visible and “sense-able” to us. The viewer re-enacts stories from the perspectives of non-humans; playing the part of a plant calling out to a bird to help with pest control, an ant planting spring flowers while simultaneously feeding her babies, an underground fungal network delivering goods to struggling trees, and a cormorant searching for a meal in a man-made lake in Queens, NY.

Thank you to collaborators Josh Rodenberg, Danielle McPhatter, and Jayne Kennedy. And project supporters Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, NY, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, and the New York Urban Field Station, a partnership between NYC Parks, the US Forest Service, and the Natural Areas Conservancy, NY.

• More info about the site, process, and people involved in this artwork here.
• My research bibliography is here. 
• Opening events to celebrate the app are announced here.

And I’m excited to get to participate in a panel discussion with Linda and 4 other artists at MoMA PS1 in Queens, NY, to celebrate.

From 3:00–4:30pm, “Monologue / Dialogue / Trialogue: Is Eco Materialism ‘What’s Next’ in Art?”

Join the discussion between Weintraub and artists Wenda Gu, Dove Bradshaw, Laura Parker, Zbigniew Oksiuta and Amy Youngs. Swap questions. Offer responses. Participate in the trialogue exploring contemporary art that pays tribute to matter, materiality, and materialization as introduced in “WHAT’S NEXT? Eco Materialism & Contemporary Art.” In the book, Weintraub identifies this vanguard art movement as ‘Eco Materialism’ because it affirms the emergent philosophy of New Materialism and it attends to the pragmatic urgency of environmentalism.

Also happening from 12-5pm, Weintraub invites you to create your own Eco Material brooch honoring neglected forms of materiality: feathers, acorns, pinecones, bones, moss, twigs, mushrooms, seeds, and/or lichens. Drop-in. Make a brooch. Transform Eco Material theory into Eco Material action.

The workshop and discussion are FREE and open to the public. Participants of all ages may drop in throughout the day. No RSVP is required.

Barley’s Underground, 467 N. High St., Columbus, Ohio 43040

Biomimicry is this month’s theme

Nature is efficient. Designers, engineers and artists who look to nature’s ingenuity for alternative physical constructs or methodologies are utilizing biometrics, also known as biomimicry.

If you haven’t ever heard of this concept, you’re in good company. The enquiry of this ageless practice is gaining recognition as it consistently solves many complex human problems, and only lately has been given a name that encapsulates a process that requires intense understanding an appreciation for the natural world that surrounds all of us.

Kim Landsbergen will kindly introduce us to biomimicry before Amy Youngs will present an overview of an art/biology class she co-taught with plant cell biologist Iris Meier.

Green Drinks is sponsored by Green Columbus, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting sustainable living in Central Ohio. Facebook event page.