Environmental Artist and Activist Lauren Bon Honored as 2025 Guggenheim Fellow
Environmental artist and activist Lauren Bon has been honored as a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Bon is included in the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows amongst 198 trailblazing artists and scholars across 53 fields tapped based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise.
“My deepest thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation for supporting my work and awarding me with a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts,” said Lauren Bon. ”This honor is not mine alone. It belongs to a living system of artists, land stewards, printers, soundmakers, gardeners, and policy hackers who have been walking this crooked path toward reparation, water justice, and transmission art for decades. This is for the soil under the tarmac, for the river in its concrete jacket, for the archives we’re building in real time. Let’s keep bending the system.”
Video: Artists Need to Create On The Same Scale That Society Has The Capacity To Destroy showing the work and practice of Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio
Established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Foundation celebrates a century of support for American intellectual and cultural life and this award ensures each Fellow can pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”
Lauren Bon current and forthcoming projects
Getty Center, Los Angeles | What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999. Through May 11, 2025
Bon’s Not a Cornfield: History/Site/Document (Essays *Timeline April 2005 May 2006*) is included in The Getty’s What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999, an interactive pop-up reading room that provides a unique opportunity for visitors to engage with over 100 photobooks by women dating from 1843 to 1999, and a selection of contemporary photobooks by post-2000 Southern California women artists. Bon’s book celebrates her seminal Not a Cornfield project that, twenty years ago, transformed an industrial brownfield site in Los Angeles into a vibrant cornfield for one agricultural cycle, remediating the former trainyard which is now the site of LA State Historic Park.
EXPO 2025, Osaka, Japan | Theme Weeks Studio | Co-Creating Cultures for the Future: Creating a New Cultural Base. May 5, 2025
Bon will join Lu Yang, Tokyo-based media artist; Kylie Kwong, Sydney-based chef; Reijiro Izum, tea master; Ho Tzu Nyen, Singapore-based contemporary artist, and Haegue Yang, sculptor/installation artist, for “Creating a New Cultural Base”, a discussion moderated by Mami Kataoka, Director of the Mori Art Museum. The panel addresses how diverse values can coexist across time and space to maximize the appeal and potential of new cultures. The program is part of EXPO’s Theme Weeks, an initiative in which countries from around the world create a “Future Society for Our Lives” and solve global-scale issues through dialogue.
About Lauren Bon
Lauren Bon is an environmental artist from Los Angeles, CA. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her studio’s ongoing work, Bending the River (2011-) aims to utilize Los Angeles’ first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the LA River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of downtown LA. This model can be replicated to regenerate the 52-mile LA River, reconnect it to its floodplain and form a citizens’ utility. A new work of disturbance ecology, Moving Mountains (2024-), will use transplanted mountain soil rescued from the recent Topanga Canyon landslide to create a series of novel ecosystems along the industrial corridor of the LA River.
Part of a global art cohort addressing our current environmental crisis, she uses living systems and infrastructure to create durational, large-scale, place-based projects, and performance, photography and sound to activate these works and engage her audiences. Through her multidisciplinary approach, Bon has carved out a space between land art, conceptual art, and transmission art. Her questioning of the status quo and persistent alteration of civic infrastructure demonstrates the power of artists to provoke change and shape opinion through soft diplomacy.
During Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a landmark regional event that opened in Fall 2024, Bon’s work has been presented across Southern California as part of related public programming at sites including California State University Dominguez Hills, Fulcrum Arts, and the La Jolla Historical Society, as well as in her solo exhibition Concrete is Fluid at Honor Fraser.
Bon’s work has been exhibited at Desert X, as part of the collateral events of the 59th edition of La Biennale di Venezia; at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The Hammer Museum at UCLA; The Exploratorium; DePaul Art Museum; The George Eastman Museum; The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA); The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MoCAD); Les Rencontres d'Arles, France, and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. She has also appeared on panels at Art Basel and UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design.
Well deserved. Congratulations!
Huge! Congratulations Lauren!!