A photograph of a human figure with eyes closed wearing an orange jumpsuit holding a large white animal skull to her head.
From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments
Aug
9
2024
Dec
13
2024
Feb
23
2025

What can seeds tell us about the future? Seeds and the plants that grow from them have provided us with food, clothing, shelter, and medicine for millennia. For just as long, humans have used sciences, technologies, myths, and art to peer into an imagined future. As we stare out toward our own future, one threatened by climate change and complicated by social unrest, the From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments exhibition looks to the seed—such as those seeds that lie at the bottom of the forest floor waiting for the cyclical fire season that promotes new growth and diversity to sprout—for inspiration and guidance on how to navigate current and coming hostile environments. From the Ground Up presents works by 16 contemporary artists and artist teams who explore diverse technologies, histories of contested spaces, and traditional understandings of nature as they imagine alternative, sustainable futures. Organized for the Armory by curator Irene Georgia Tsatsos, the exhibition bridges familiar distinctions between art and science while exploring practices and traditions that predate contemporary understandings of those disciplines. In this exhibition, artworks, knowledge traditions, and histories converge in space and across time.

From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments Higher Education Curricular Resource

"Stages of Tectonic Blackness: Blackdom," 2021, Nikesha Breeze.Digital video still with Nikesha Breeze. Image by mk. Courtesy of the artist. ©2021 Nikesha Breeze.

Free

Armory Center for the Arts

145 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena

Gallery Hours
FRI:2pm-6pm
SAT-SUN:1pm-5pm
MON-THU:CLOSED

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