Artmaking and Apocalypse: Four Artists on Octavia E. Butler

While her fiction may seem to eerily prophesize our current moment, Butler’s science fiction stories (mostly written in the 1980s and ’90s) grew from her acute observation of the very real crises brewing around her (racism, inequity, climate change), allowing her to anticipate how our unchecked societal malignancies could metastasize over time. Butler poured these observations into fantastical realms inhabited by non-heteronormative beings, creatures she wielded to subversively challenge the hierarchical norms endemic to our own world. As a dystopian tale marked by the threat of fascism and the extreme ramifications of climate change—scarcity, destitution, fanaticism, slavery, tyranny, violence—Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998), offer some of Butler’s keenest insights into the perils of life in the contemporary United States. Their relevance persists because, out of all of her imagined realities, the Parable novels’ fractious future is the one that most incisively incriminates our present, and not only because the novels’ fictional timeline now coincides with our current moment. Butler ultimately viewed both novels as warnings, yet the crises she forewarned are already here: To quote her protagonist, “things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit.”⁵ Eventually, disintegration yields to collapse. The two novels, often referred to as the Earthseed series, span the years 2024–2027 and 2032–2035, respectively, conjuring a speculative future marred by environmental and societal collapse. Protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina, the teenage Black daughter of a preacher, lives with her family behind the fortified walls of a close-knit, working-class community. Due to an unspecified apocalypse, the world beyond the walls is dangerously brutal, with violence and savagery running amok. The structures of government and society have remained intact just enough to allow for a villainous fascist to reign, one who ominously talks of “making America great again.”⁶ In response to the tumult around her, Lauren develops a personal religious philosophy called Earthseed, which posits that there is no God in the traditional monotheistic sense—God is simply the force of change. She approaches her belief system as a kind of found object: not a thing that she concocts from the depths of her imagination, but rather a fundamental truth that she observes in the world around her. She eventually codifies this theology into a network of cooperative Earthseed communities that collectively espouse environmental stewardship and mutual care—radical prospects for a world splintered by brutality and deceit. Parable’s most frequently cited quotation, etched on Butler’s tombstone, posits this notion of change as a type of personal and collective reciprocity: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”⁷

In one of the novel’s more imaginative elements, Lauren secretly suffers from a sensory disorder called Hyperempathy that causes her to palpably experience any bodily wound she witnesses as if it were inflicted upon her own flesh. This pernicious condition ultimately offers the potential for radical social transformation: “if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain…who would cause anyone unnecessary pain?”⁸ The subtext is that change can be simultaneously somatic and systemic, and that gestures of reciprocal care can stanch the bleed of collective suffering.

Many of the artists inspired by Butler’s work have seized upon this tenet of transformation, examining how our bodies, environments, and societal milieus can alternatively wound or nurture one another, highlighting their intrinsic entanglements. Firelei Báez’s large-scale painting, On rest and resistance, Because we love you (to all those stolen from among us) (2020), which was part of New York’s Public Art Fund Art on the Grid installation project in 2020 and on view at the Bronx Museum in 2021, allegorizes this sentiment.⁹ Melding abstract, figurative, and surrealist sensibilities, the work depicts a tightly cropped Black female figure at rest in a field of grass, her face nearly obscured by lush blooms that disperse into thick, shiny coils of rich brown hair. A single eye, almost cloaked, meets the viewer’s gaze. The subject, bedecked in a diaphanous dress beautifully rendered by Báez’s gleaming brushstrokes, has a copy of Parable of the Sower laying open in her lap. This idyllic vision of a Black woman symbiotically communing with an abundant green earth—eschewing the toils of capitalism in favor of leisure and literature—represents a moment of pleasure, agency, and bodily sovereignty that nonetheless eulogizes the toils of the past (and present), as the title suggests. It also establishes a dialectical tension with the unseen viewer, who hovers from a voyeuristic vantage point of power. The figure’s lack of vigilance subverts this hierarchical dynamic, supposing instead a reciprocal exchange of vulnerability and trust. By framing Butler so prominently, the painting ultimately positions Parable of the Sower as both an emblem and an omen: This Edenic tableau, like the novel’s hellish dystopia, functions as a speculative social reality that is contingent on our collective behavior toward one another.

Connie Samaras’ conceptual photographs based on Parable of the Sower similarly employ the book as a symbolic object within a verdant composition. Her images depict vignettes of cacti and other flora from the Huntington Desert Garden in Pasadena, which she photographed through enlarged transparencies made from Butler’s handwritten notes about the book (Butler’s archives are currently housed at the Huntington Library). In Huntington Desert Garden (agave) and OEB 1723, novel fragment from Parable of the Sower, 1989 (2016), the sinuous limbs of a large, variegated agave occupy the entire image frame in a tangled and semi-abstract composition. Superimposed over the plant are snippets of Butler’s handwriting; her notational marks disappear and re-materialize like guarded murmurs. Though it’s nearly illegible, the word “changing” functions as one of the image’s most visually prominent elements. This reference to Earthseed’s central belief system simultaneously implicates our ongoing detrimental alteration of the environment and identifies perpetual metamorphosis as the natural world’s native state, in which survival necessitates interspecies symbiosis. Samaras’ title for this series, The Past is Another Planet, positions the work as a botanical study of an existentially threatened ecosystem—an eventual vestige of Earth’s fertile past.

Connie Samaras, Huntington Chinese Garden; OEB 3245 Commonplace Book 1990, fragment on climate change and changing the ways humans inhabit Earth (2016). Archival pigment print from film. Image courtesy of the artist and Clockshop.

Connie Samaras, Huntington Desert Garden, Agave; OEB 1723, Novel Fragment, Parable of the Sower, 1989 (2016). Archival pigment print from film. Image courtesy of the artist and Clockshop.

Together, both Báez and Samaras offer intimate, microcosmic glances at hyper-specific moments or environments, one ecological and one interpersonal, suggesting that sustained care for a single being bolsters the integrity of the entire living system. In both Parable novels, Samaras’ notion of the past as another planet emerges quite literally. Butler details how climate change has obliterated Earth’s fragile ecology—a brittle Southern California wilts without rainfall for years—making edible plants, fruits, and seeds precious and labor- intensive commodities. While Lauren’s Earthseed community nurtures the land as if it were a living body, tending to it so that it may sustain its inhabitants in return, the movement’s ultimate (and somewhat contradictory) goal lies in abandoning this synergistic relationship altogether and eloping to other planetary worlds: “The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.”¹⁰ Humans, Lauren asserts, can function as seeds for propagating life beyond the bounds of this planet, just as a windborne plant embryo takes root in the soil of a distant island.

Alicia Piller’s immersive sculpture, Mission Control. Earthseed (2024), included in The Brick’s PST exhibition, Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism, specifically interprets this element of the narrative. Like Samaras, Piller culled from Butler’s archives at the Huntington, embedding images of the author’s handwritten notes within the work. The sculpture recalls the crew module of a spaceship, represented as a pliable, tent-like structure that stretches down from the ceiling and encompasses three large chairs, which seem to have the potential to grasp onto a body (viewers are encouraged to sit). Composed of pliant, salvaged materials including vinyl, paper, and fabric, the sculpture has the supple elasticity of skin, perhaps a nod to the living, womb-like spaceship central to Butler’s Dawn (the first novel in her Lilith’s Brood trilogy). Emerald green with trailing, snake-like limbs, the back of each chair exhibits ornate patterning reminiscent of the reproductive organs of a flower or a human vulva: elliptical orifices, looping folds, embedded seed pods, tiny hairs. With the inclusion of these symbolic fruiting bodies, this futuristic craft seems poised to sow its organic cargo, perhaps with the aim of attracting unknown pollinators as it traverses extrasolar worlds. Piller employs Butler’s narrative as a fulcrum for a speculative sculptural abstraction, creating a hybrid automotive being that conceptually intertwines the processes of change and creation.

Alicia Piller, Mission Control. Earthseed (installation view) (2024). Mixed media. Image courtesy of the artist and Track 16, commissioned by The Brick. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

Whereas Piller contextualizes Butler’s work in an abstract visual lexicon, American Artist hones in on its wider philosophical and cosmological implications. Their years-long, multi-venue exhibition project, Shaper of God, connects the novels’ science fiction themes to the real-world development of rocket technology, the history of which has deeply shaped Southern California’s social, economic, and natural landscapes. (Like Butler, American Artist hails from Altadena). The Monophobic Response (2024), exhibited at LACMA in 2024 and recently on view at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works, takes its title from Butler’s eponymous 1995 essay that explores the human instincts of fear and longing. In a video performance, the artist deploys a fully functional rocket engine in the Mojave Desert, a reenactment of a 1936 launch test. The video imagines a multiracial cohort of Earthseed adherents gathering in barren terrain to ignite their engine prototype, proposing an alternative reality wherein cooperative communities, rather than neocolonial oligarchs, revolutionize space exploration for the existential and spiritual betterment of all humans.

American Artist, The Monophobic Response (film still (detail) (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA.

American Artist, The Monophobic Response (sculpture) (2024). Steel, methanol, oxygen, tanks, sandbags, hoses, paper, and pencil, 150 × 72 × 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and LACMA.

Together, these artworks merge the premises of Butler’s literature with the predicaments of our own imperiled reality, using the theses of her fiction—change, attentiveness, care, reciprocity—as relational propositions for shaping the contours of our own future, however speculative. Artists, with their unique attunement to material fallibility, share a kinship with Butler’s protagonist, whose condition of hyperempathy is a metaphor for the role of the artist at the end of the world: to absorb the pains and pleasures of their environs and translate them into something new. Harnessing this ethos, the artists discussed here propose dictums of change through tenets of care that mitigate collective pain and trauma: How do we relate to vulnerable bodies and ecosystems, now and in the future? This question dissects power’s inevitable abuse: Who gets to dictate the terms of our mutual survival? Báez’s incandescent painting, Samaras’ enigmatic photograph, Piller’s anthropomorphic spaceship, and American Artist’s Afrofuturistic vision will not, on their own, obliterate fascism or stall our extinction; collectively, however, they underscore the notion—crystalized by Butler herself— that kernels of radical thought and subtle shifts in perspective can, over time, ripple outward to elicit seismic sociocultural changes. Perhaps, then, we can one day implement the antidote to our own self-induced apocalypse. In the meantime, as large catastrophes overwhelm, small poetic gestures sustain. If we lose those, what remains?