This post was originally published on artnews.com
In September 2020, Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for the first time. The story of a Black California teen searching for a way to live sustainably in a community ravaged by climate change, fires, and civil unrest seemed timelier than ever, especially given that the novel opens in July 2024. That fall, Butler, who was the first science fiction author to receive a MacArthur “Genius” fellowship, also landed on the syllabus for an ecofeminism seminar taught by art historian Jane McFadden and curator Catherine Taft at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.
Taft and McFadden had independently been exploring the intersection of feminism, nature, and land art when they came together to teach the seminar. They were struck by how Butler’s tale seemed to surpass fiction into reality. Her metaphor of a sower planting seeds also seemed like an ideal way to reconsider this underrecognized activist movement and facilitate a dialogue about how we engage with the natural world. Amid the pandemic and the protests and the reckonings following George Floyd’s murder earlier that year, their timing was also challenging and personal.
“Catherine had just become a mom, and I had just lost my mom,” McFadden, ArtCenter’s dean of interdisciplinary studies, recalled in a recent interview with ARTnews. “The pandemic was happening, we were teaching online, California had burst into flames, and the local conditions of our lives and the evidence of social and global crisis were piling up around us.”
Taft had been working on an ecofeminism exhibition since 2018 for LAXART, where she has been a curator since 2015. After a Covid-related delay, that exhibition, titled “Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism,” opened in September as part of the Getty Foundation’s exhibition initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide and it inaugurated LAXART’s relocation to a new home and its rebranding as The Brick. (The exhibition’s accompanying catalog, edited by Taft and McFadden and publishing in late 2025, will be the first comprehensive scholarly publication on ecofeminism, surveying ecological activism and artistic outputs.)
Featuring the work of 16 artists made between the 1970s and today, including new commissions, “Life on Earth” looks at how an intersectional group of artists from around the world use different disciplines to explore ecofeminist methodologies.
“Ecofeminism is a tool that anyone can use,” Taft said. “I look at it as a tool for thinking, a way to comment and critique the powers that are destroying our environment and the patriarchal and capitalist systems that uphold that destruction.”
The term ecofeminism first appeared in an essay by French author and activist Françoise d’Eaubonne’s in her 1974 book Feminism or Death: How the Woman’s Movement Can Save the Planet. d’Eaubonne posits that patriarchy not only subordinates women’s bodies but also drives the exploitation of nature. Around the same time, second-wave feminist artists in the United States used their practices to make similar connections between violence against women and violence against nature, especially in the anti-nuclear and environmental protests of the ’70s and ’80s.
More recently, in their landmark 2014 book, Ecofeminism, Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies, argue for, among other things, a return to feminine traditional Indigenous knowledge that eschews mono-agriculture and genetically modified foods, while acknowledging that those most harmed by climate change are marginalized communities of color and women. As Australian sociologist and activist Ariel Salleh wrote in the book’s foreword, “Ecological feminists are both streetfighters and philosophers.”
The current show at The Brick includes pioneering ecofeminist artists like Leslie Leibowitz Starus and Aviva Rahmani, whose early performance work centered around violence against women, and later evolved into ecological concerns. For Leibowitz Starus that meant urban farming, and an artistic practice alongside a superfoods business called Sproutime. Her installation, SPROUTIME IS NOW! (2024), includes a protest poster first created in 1979, that reads simply, “Women Reclaim the Earth,” as well as buckets of seeds and trays of live sprouts.
Aviva Rahmani’s slide documentation of a 1972 performance piece, Physical Education, is a reminder of the cycles of life and the treatment and mistreatment of water as a precious resource. Facsimiles from Rahmani’s Ghost Net Journals (1991–2000) document her successful restoration of a dumpsite off the coast of Maine into a flourishing, regenerative wetland that is also her home.
“Ecofeminist ideas have been internalized into the culture, even though a lot of the earlier work has disappeared from discourse,” Rahmani told ARTnews. “They may not use that label, but younger artists are affirming the same things that drove us. Nature is beautiful and important; nature is fragile and that’s what it also means to be a woman. Women should be protected—we are entitled to be protected, just as nature is entitled to be protected.”
Like Rahmani, Colombian-born, LA-based artist Carolina Caycedo is interested in protecting biodiversity and regenerative farming. Her commissioned piece, Ñañay Kculli ~ S’oam Bawi Wenag ~ Kiik K’úum (2024), honors the Indigenous practice of planting corn, squash, and beans together as a biodiverse triumvirate that helps sustain soil health, while also serving as food staples. Her larger-than-life seeds made of wood, emphasize the universal motif of the seed that runs through the show. She cradles them in jute hammocks, and they hang from the ceiling, encompassing the viewer like guardians who can show us a way forward.
“Seeds are small things that are incredible powerhouses if you take care of them,” Caycedo said. “They grow, they sustain, and they honor the Native women who maintain this knowledge, connecting to feminist genealogies of the women who are leading environmental justice struggles across the continent.”
Generational knowledge also plays a role in South Korean artist Yo-E Ryou’s works focused on the culture of Haenyeo, the women divers on Jeju Island who free dive, harvesting shellfish for their livelihood. For 숨 오케스트라 (Breath Orchestra), Act 1, 2024, Ryou has created a symphony of women’s breath from divers, between the ages of 10 to 80. It is a poetic reminder of the universal force of life and how breath sustains us in symbiosis with the oceans.
Meanwhile, Alicia Piller’s mixed-media installation, Mission Control. Earthseed (2024), is an immersive environment that invites you to sit down and experience the prescient wisdom of Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Earthseed refers to the new religion created by Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, in which “All that you touch, You Change. / All that you Change, Changes you. / The only lasting truth is Change / God is Change.”
Drawing on the author’s archive at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in nearby San Marino, Piller incorporated photographs of Butler’s copious handwritten notes about climate change and women’s leadership. Using upcycled found materials, pieces of nature like seeds and pinecones, as well as imagined, organism-like forms, Piller said, “I want you to be implicated in this history. You are the next step of this upward movement. We’re talking about heavy things, the destruction of the planet but let’s not dwell on the sadness or the despair. Let’s try to figure out something together.”