Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar

Centering the unique cultural, historical, and environmental context of Los Angeles in partnership with Tongva (Gabrielino) leaders, The Broad is undertaking a public reforestation and reconciliation project inspired by artist and environmentalist Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks). Beuys’s action—part performance, part installation—began in 1982 and involved planting 7,000 trees accompanied by stone markers throughout Kassel, Germany, as a means of collectively reckoning with the traumas of World War II. Since then, Beuys’s vision has propagated to other cities, with more modest tree-planting initiatives in Minneapolis, New York, and elsewhere. The Broad—whose collection includes one of the world’s most complete groupings of Beuys’s multiples—brings this concept to Los Angeles, presenting Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar.

Social Forest highlights the continued impact of Beuys’s installation in Kassel and brings new meaning to this reforestation action four decades later, in a vastly different landscape that also demands repair. The initiative combines the project with programs that address overlapping issues of environmental justice and political and ecological reconciliation and restoration. The Broad has partnered with North East Trees—a community-based non-profit that plans parks and conservation projects throughout Los Angeles—and is using education materials developed with the help of Tongva (Gabrielino) leaders to educate students about the importance of California oak trees to the pre-colonial inhabitants of present-day Los Angeles.