Latest News
Not A Cornfield 20th Anniversary, Moving Mountains Tours, Printed Matter's LA Art Book Fair and Climate Resilient L.A. Petition Delivery and Community Rally
Congratulations again to Lauren Bon, honored as 2025 Guggenheim Fellow! Check out our post here.
Not A Cornfield 20th Anniversary
This summer marks the twentieth anniversary of Lauren Bon’s seminal work Not A Cornfield, when planting a million kernels of corn turned a notorious brownfield site into a verdant field for one agricultural cycle. Corn is a powerful remediator, pulling toxins and heavy metals from compromised soil, and Not A Cornfield helped revitalize the site which is now Los Angeles State Historic Park. To honor the legacy and influence of this incredible work, Lauren Bon is planting a new formation of corn and leading a curatorial working group that will tend the indexical cornfield, transforming it into a nexus of collective action, song, dance, stewardship, and storytelling.
The original installation created regenerative bonds with the many human and more-than-human voices of Los Angeles, and with the floodplain that nurtured — and was restored by — the cornfield. Guided by that vision, the group will facilitate a series of public activations and interventions that invoke the teachings of the Milpa, or Three Sisters — an Indigenous agricultural practice of cultivating three mutually beneficial crops: corn, squash, and legumes. As Metabolic Studio plants its twentieth season of corn, this reactivation will serve as an anti-monument to an ever-growing mutual aid network. In turn, this reactivation of Not A Cornfield invites the Los Angeles community to gather throughout the growing season — to move, witness, and stand in sisterhood with and for the land.
other others // rehearsals in the skin, Friday, May 2 – Monday, May 5. Opening Reception — Sunday May 4, 7–9pm
Human Resources, 410 Cottage Home St, Los Angeles, CA 90012
other others // rehearsals in the skin is a four-day exhibition and programming series bringing together artists, practitioners, and facilitators to explore how we relate, connect, and feel—together. other others considers anti-colonial forms of touch as a method for collective dreaming, disability justice, ecological repair, Palestinian liberation, and queer futurity.
The exhibition features tactile, sculpture, audio, interactive and digital works by Lauren Bon, Genevieve Belleveau, Vanessa Hernández Cruz, Nat Decker, Anne Juren, Ericka Lopez, Siphiwe Mbonambi, Liz Nurneberg, Ashton Phillips, Teddy Pozo, Jaklin Romine, Laura Stinger and Touch Praxis. There are also performances and screenings, personalized touch-based performances and an exhibition zine collecting other haptic works. Check out the full schedule here.
REIMAGINE Printmaking and Collective Action
Monday, May 5, 5 – 8pm, sign up for the waitlist
Monday, June 2, 5 – 8pm, RSVP here
REIMAGINE is our monthly printmaking studio and community gathering, where we share space and create symbols of protest and activism to carry back out into the world. We have had great turnouts, and are building an incredible archive of new prints and screens. We have also added monoprints and transfer prints to our practice. Come check it out!
To make sure everyone who attends has a chance to make prints of their own, we’ve updated a few of our policies:
With your RSVP, you can sign up for a one-hour slot at one of our tables on a first-come, first-served basis
If there are no more RSVPs available for a specific date, come volunteer! Sign up here
If you have RSVPed and you can’t make it, please let us know so we can give your spot to someone on our waitlist
We’ll have a few wearable items available, but please bring anything specific you’re interested in printing on (or donations for other people to print on!), and drinks or snacks to share.
We just opened the list for our June 2 REIMAGINE session — spots go fast so sign up now!
Moving Mountains Tours - Fridays, May 9 through June 27
Tours: 8:30 – 10:30am, Optional Workshops: 10:30am–12pm
1795 Pasadena Ave, Los Angeles CA 90031 - RSVP here
Moving Mountains is a weekly tour and teach-in at the Moon — a former tow yard transformed into a living floodplain on the east bank of the LA River. The tour focuses on debris dislodged by the recent landslides and wildfires along Route 27 in Topanga Canyon. Rather than discard this fertile forest soil, Moving Mountains invites us to consider its generative potential, and how we can transform disaster into ecological repair.
Join us every Friday from May 9 through June 27, to learn how disturbance becomes a resource. Tours will be conducted from 8:30am – 10:30am, and from 10:30am – 12pm, we’ll continue the conversation with an optional workshop and brainstorming session around the topics discussed on the tour, and collectively mobilize for a more climate-resilient future.
The tours will culminate in our Optimists’ Breakfast, on Friday, June 13, a gathering of dreamers, doers, and ecosystem hackers from across the watershed. Together, we’ll explore radical hope, soil-based pragmatism, and projects that transform storm debris and bureaucratic inertia into tools of repair. The conversation is open-source, hands-on, and anti-apocalyptic.
Sign up here for upcoming tours (May 9, 16, 23 and 30 and June 6, 20 and 27). More information and the RSVP for our June 13 Optimists’ Breakfast will be coming soon, and if you have a project or idea aligned with these themes and would like to present at the Optimists’ Breakfast, please reach out to Kelly Majewski at kmajewski@metabolicstudio.org.
Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI) Community Forum, Thursday, May 15, 8am – 1:30pm - Register here
On May 15, Metabolic Studio will be part of the LANI Community Forum. LANI works with communities to plan and implement neighborhood-scale infrastructure improvements, and create walkable, green, safe neighborhoods with equitable access to resources, open spaces, public transit, and economic opportunity. This year’s keynote speakers are Laura Rubio, General Manager, City of LA Department of Transportation and Paul Krekorian, Executive Director, City of LA Office of Major Events.
We’ll be running a workshop for community members and civic leaders on our Bending the River and Un-development projects, demonstrating new ways of thinking about the ground beneath our feet, and how to use infrastructure to create both intimate and large-scale change.
Metabolic Studio at Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair, Thursday, May 15 – Sunday May 18
ArtCenter College of Design, 950 S Raymond Ave, Pasadena, CA 91105, Level 1, Booth D26
Check out the full schedule here
Metabolic Studio is excited to be exhibiting at this year’s LA Art Book Fair, bringing our publishing and archiving practice to ArtCenter in Pasadena from May 15-18. We’re looking forward to celebrating art books and the art book community, connecting with other artists, publishers, and collectors and most importantly, debuting stunning new work.
We have produced a series of new publications commemorating Metabolic Studio and our ongoing practice preserving and highlighting essential cultural markers connected to our work. Our new work is a series of six boxes holding images and impressions from our Special Projects in Archiving (featuring artists Lita Albuquerque and Eugenia Butler, and ephemera from the Woman’s Building), work from Metabolic Studio’s Sonic Division and Optics Division, and a box that holds life from our project Moving Mountains.
We will be launching the boxes with a series of conversations and demonstrations. Check out our schedule below:
Friday May 16
2pm — Launch of The Fires We Live With — Lauren Bon and Lita Albuquerque in Conversation
4pm — Launch of Fires of the West — Lauren Bon and Richard Nielsen in Conversation
Saturday May 17
12pm — Launch of Eugenia Butler: Documents of Invisibility…Shimmering Before Wondering — Lauren Bon, Carolyne Aycaguer and Corazon del Sol in Conversation
2pm — Launch of Life is Abundant — Richard Nielsen and Wendy Isabella Escobar Procopio in Conversation, with cameraless photography demonstration
Sunday, May 18
12pm — Launch of Magic Happens — Lauren Bon and Cheri Gaulke in Conversation
2pm — Launch of Enchanting the Floodplain — Enchanting the Floodplain with the Cristal Bachet: Richard Nielsen and Douglas Lee in conversation
Climate Resilient L.A. Petition Delivery and Community Rally, Thursday, May 22
1:30pm — Gather in Grand Park / 2pm — Procession and Rally
Gloria Molina Grand Park, 200 N Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012
RSVP here
Protect our communities. Protect our environment. Protect L.A.
Climate Resilient L.A. invites you to stand with communities across L.A. to make our voices heard and demand stronger climate action!
The January 2025 firestorms have devastated the mountains and basins of Los Angeles County, underscoring the dire consequences of climate change, insufficient land and water management, and a lack of coordinated preparedness. Entire communities have been displaced, ecosystems decimated, and lives forever altered. Our petition is a call to take immediate and transformative action. Please add your signature to the Climate Resilient L.A. Petition here and share with your local L.A. communities.
On May 22nd, community members will be holding a youth-led assembly and procession to deliver the petition to the L.A. Board of Supervisors. This afternoon gathering will be held from 2-5pm, the procession will begin at Gloria Molina Grand Park and end at the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration.
RSVP here and you can find more information here.
Future Flows - On through July 6, 2025
MarinMOCA San Rafael, 1210 Fifth Avenue, San Rafael, CA, 94901
Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio’s piece New Public Infrastructure (2022) anchors Future Flows, a group exhibition at MarinMOCA on through July 6. The exhibition, featuring local and international artists, explores water as both a vital ecosystem and a signal of global climate change, and addresses sea level rise, water infrastructure, and industry effects on aquatic life.
Upcoming Future Flow events include filmmaker and artist Su Yu Hsin hosting a series of short films focused on climate change and water systems, a community conversation with Marin sea level specialists Kate Hagemann and Chris Choo, Cheryl E. Leonard: Duetting with the Seashore, musical soundscapes from underwater recordings made around the Bay Area, and Sacred Earth: Faith & Climate where Rev. Sally Bingham, an Episcopal priest and founder of The Regeneration Project and Interfaith Power & Light, and Jodi Roberts, Executive Director of MarinMOCA, will delve into the intersection of environmental stewardship, religious ethics, and art, examining ways to bridge the gap between environmental awareness and meaningful action. Check out the schedule here.
National Recognition for Patsiata (Owens Lake)
Patsiata, located in what is now known as Owens Valley, is the indigenous name for Owens Lake, the water source the Los Angeles Aqueduct has been draining for over a hundred years. The lake bed is often dry now, in a land the Paiute call Payahuunadü, or “place of flowing water.”
After years of work by the Tribal Historical Preservation Officers (THPOs) of the five Tribes whose homelands encompass the district, Patsiata was officially recognized for its cultural and historical importance and joined the National Register of Historic Places on March 3, 2025. Patsiata has been the center of culture and way of life in Payahuunadü since time immemorial, and the listing celebrates the lake’s role in stories, songs, and ceremonies, both in the past and in the present-day lives of Indigenous People. It also describes tragedies and massacres left out of standard history texts.
Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Tribe THPO Kathy Bancroft says, “This is the first document about the history of the area that comes almost completely from the Indigenous voice.” In fact, sharing the Indigenous perspective was one of the motivations for the effort in the first place. As Fort Independence Tribe THPO Sean Scruggs has stated, “Tribes must bring their perspective forward in a way that helps everyone understand that the world is not ours, it is a gift that we must care for now so that future generations can live and survive in the future.”