From Earthwork to Test Plot:
Transdisciplinary Approaches to Ecological Reparation

Leer en Español

Test Plot in Elysian Park, Los Angeles, California (2023). Image courtesy of Terremoto. Photo: Nina Weithorn.

1.

A garden is a garden is a garden is a garden…

In 2020, artist David Horvitz, in collaboration with landscape architecture office Terremoto, began transforming the neglected lot adjacent to his studio in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles, into 7th Ave Garden (2020–present). The project is a space, a site, an experience, and a “plant-based [art]work,” according to Artillery.¹ But more compelling than the trivial qualification of a “garden” as “art” is the utility of this transdisciplinary fusion. In what measure does it inform or enhance the work’s capacity to mediate plausible and meaningful ecological reparation? To what extent is contemporary art obligated toward efficacious ecological outcomes in the context of land-based practice? These are the crucial questions that 7th Ave Garden and adjacent artworks posit, challenging us to discern where artistic innovation and environmental remediation coalesce towards tangible, ethical action.

Art’s present entanglement with design and the environmental humanities reflects an expanding public consciousness of colonial anthropogenic climate and biodiversity crises. Today, as efforts to reduce carbon emissions flail and unpredictable weather patterns increasingly threaten life on Earth, it is understood that addressing these matters requires tactical coordination across political, spatial, and disciplinary borders. Terremoto, whose gardens are remarkable studies in both form and intention, is but one example of a contemporary practice that torques the traditional boundaries of its field. “Our primary goal [is] to do right by the land,” Terremoto’s co-founder and principal David Godshall writes in a project statement for 7th Ave Garden.² “To repair it, to restore it, to be kind to it, to respect it,” he continues. Within commercial landscape architecture, it remains rare for projects to transcend client-driven imperatives and achieve visionary status, yet this is precisely what Terremoto endeavors: “It is our goal to build gardens and landscapes not for this civilization,” Godshall says, “but rather, the next.”³

I like the idea of a landscape, or a garden, as nothing less than a host for future life. In Los Angeles, where the extremes of organic and human-built environments chafe against a backdrop of colonial violence, migration, and fantasy, transdisciplinary artistic practices are uniquely poised to navigate this infirm terrain. In my work as a writer, as a teacher, and with my project No Canyon Hills (2023– present)—a community coalition seeking land back conservation in the Verdugo Mountains—I increasingly encounter practitioners operating in this manner, zipping across disciplinary vectors. Studio Moonya, for instance, led by Hyunch Sung, crafts California gardens that weave together material history and cultural nuances, connecting people, place, and memory. Hyunch also co-founded Ssi Ya Gi (Seed Story), a collective that elevates the narratives of senior immigrants through food, cultivating Korean heritage crops, hosting meals, and publishing zines that extend and record intergenerational diasporic experiences. Active Cultures, an organization dedicated to examining foodways, stages events that intersect food, ecology, and contemporary art. Clockshop, Metabolic Studio, and Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) focus on public programming that supports environmental education, highlighting riparian habitat and the health of the L.A. River. Then there’s Crenshaw Dairy Mart, which conceptualizes garden operations as abolitionist pods; Living Earth, an arts organization that connects soundscape and landscape; Meztli Projects, an Indigenous arts and culture collaborative; and the Ron Finley Project (RFP), which transforms urban food deserts into vibrant food sanctuaries.

These are but a few examples of the innovative creative forces, spanning contiguous fields of art, environmental science, urban planning, and anti-colonial activism, that point towards a multifaceted, contemporary ecocritical movement where art actively participates in environmental sustainability and social equity at a scale beyond the representational. The complex challenges of our time, rooted in a history of settler violence and amplified by the urgency of potentially non-remediable climate change, require innovative, cross-disciplinary collaborations that, in their manifoldness, resist easy ontological classification. In some instances, it may even be difficult to discern a gesture as art, the work having cleanly hopped its representational enclosure altogether: art on the run, wreaking havoc in the real.

Among the many noteworthy projects in L.A. that embody this philosophy, 7th Ave Garden, which bolsters biodiversity and supports native pollinators, and Metabolic Studio’s Bending the River (2012–present), which employs bioremediation to irrigate a public park, are exemplary case studies through which to scrutinize the processes, limitations, and transformative potential of these interdisciplinary efforts.

Tour of Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio’s Bending the River (2012–present) during the construction phase in the Los Angeles River, 2023. © Metabolic Studio, LLC. Image courtesy of Metabolic Studio.

2.

7th Ave Garden is modest, about 5,000 square feet, dotted with mounds of fragrant sage, clumps of yarrow, dozens of Sycamore starters, and piles of rubble and rebar—gifts from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) following its contentious demolition. Reconstituting institutional rubble (ruins) into new, ecologically inflected artwork resonates as a tidy metaphor for an ongoing reappraisal of art’s heritage and future value. But it is the shaggy, habitat-dense pollinator planting, the chaparral shrubbery, and its self-mulching understory that asserts the work’s identity as more than merely symbolic. The transformation of the formerly untended lot into a “lush garden of native plants”⁴ indicates a broader paradigm shift, in which collapsing divisions between artists (such as Horvitz) and commercial design offices (such as Terremoto) opens doors for actually-generative ecological interventions that exceed the symbolic transgressions typical of contemporary art. Framing 7th Ave Garden as both a garden and an artwork poses an interesting question: If the intrinsic ecological value of the garden persists independent of its artistic designation, what other potentialities does “art” enable—or preclude?

Test Plot (2019–present), Terremoto’s ongoing “guerilla”⁵ experiment in community land care, predates their joint venture with Horvitz, setting their precedent for the communal and ecologically reparative use of public space. What began as a novel exploit in Elysian Park has grown into a program, seeding multiple “test plots”—modestly-sized plots around the city and throughout the state that are weeded and planted primarily with California native plants.⁶ By inviting community volunteers to support the long-term maintenance of these restoration zones, Terremoto has successfully produced an integrated stewardship model that can be replicated and scaled. Like 7th Ave Garden, Test Plot is a crucible. Both projects echo the concept of “usership” proposed by theorist Stephen Wright, who writes on art’s potential beyond aesthetic-conceptual function. Extending a postmodern lineage, Wright assigns equal value to the user’s role in art, promoting a shared responsibility for ecological stewardship and community engagement.⁷

A major distinction between the two projects, however, is in their contexts. When Horvitz and Terremoto repurposed the neglected lot into a rejuvenated ecosystem, the synergy of their collaboration secured institutional acknowledgment from cultural heavyweights, including the commercial gallery Vielmetter Los Angeles, nonprofit exhibition space JOAN, and publication Triple Canopy.⁸ Such recognition cemented Horvitz’s dual identity as an artist and environmental steward while bestowing on Terremoto the attention of an artworld audience. As a bona fide artwork and nexus of collaborative artistic production, 7th Ave Garden is upheld by what Wright terms “an institutionally guaranteed framing device”⁹—the network of museums, galleries, critics, and academic institutions that sanctions certain objects, spaces, or performances as “art.”

As an artwork, then, 7th Ave Garden is endowed with a rarefied cultural currency. During Frieze week in March, scores of cultural actors gathered on its mulchy grounds for luncheons and readings. In May, Mexico City-based writer and curator Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez will host “a regenerative community barbeque” in the garden, co-programmed with Artbook at Hauser & Wirth LA and Active Cultures.¹⁰ 7th Ave Garden’s status renders it a medium and platform for ecological discourse intended to mobilize community engagement and shape ideological narratives that address our planet’s pressing ecological challenges. But the twinning of cultural and ecological values should also prompt a certain scrutiny, given the art world’s bent towards commodification and exclusivity. “How can I get a coyote to live here?”¹¹ Horvitz ponders in his project statement. I can’t help but wonder whether the coyotes may have been more abundant before the artists rolled in.

At the local level, the double bind of retooling art’s symbolic agency to realize ecological reparation occurs at the risk of such projects becoming vehicles of cultural commodification and gentrification, ultimately spurring development that prioritizes profitability rather than community or ecological (other-than-human) benefits. The trend is evident in L.A. neighborhoods where an influx of galleries, like those that participate in the annual Frieze fair, drives up property value, precipitating a cascade of effects for residents.¹² L.A.’ Indigenous practitioners know all too well that any serious ecological movement, no matter how creatively or rhetorically invigorating, will fail its justice-oriented goal without an integrated anti-colonial ethic that honors reciprocity, interdependence, and the mutual flourishing of all living beings.¹³ Although 7th Ave Garden does not claim to provide a panacea for the deeply entrenched social structures under which we live and make art—or gardens—it does herald a redirection of artistic action away from purely phenomenological experience and instead toward a more functional framework that can approach to the societal and environmental needs of our time.

In essence, 7th Ave Garden is a contemporary manifestation of a long-reaching dialogue between art and environment, one that has evolved significantly over the years. While the garden channels the radical spirit and conceptual provocation of the mid-twentieth century “land art” (or “earthwork”) movement, it diverts from its predecessors’ paths by foregoing the massive structural interventions in the landscape conceived by artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, who reshaped vast tracts of earth into monumental artworks. While they may have hinted at the potential for art’s engagement with ecological themes, their work was primarily symbolic, frequently spectacular, and reveled in nature’s sublimity. It was also willfully oblivious to the violent colonial mechanisms and ecological exploitations reproduced in the formation of the work itself. Examining 7th Ave Garden’s historical precedent, we see that the trajectory of art’s engagement with land-based practice reflects not only shifting cultural and environmental sensibilities—capitulating to a more nuanced interplay between artistic expression and ecological consciousness—but tensions within art’s very ontology, its peculiar and particular mode of existence.

3.

Last summer, amid a terrible heatwave, I clambered into the back of a multi-passenger minivan in the parking lot of a repurposed tow yard in Lincoln Heights to tour an art project on the Los Angeles River. It was my first encounter with Metabolic Studio, an interdisciplinary art and research laboratory founded by environmental artist Lauren Bon that aims to explore “critical social and environmental issues through art interventions and innovative projects aimed at reparation.”¹⁴ Over the years, activists and organizers alike have made various attempts to uncage the river from its concrete cladding: Metabolic Studio’s major project, Bending the River, is an ambitious attempt at intervention. The studio aims to redirect a low-flow portion of the river into an onsite filtration area before flushing it into the irrigation grid of Los Angeles State Historic Park (LASHP), utilizing the river as a sustainable water source for an urban green space. Headed by Bon, Bending the River is simultaneously presented as art and as a broad-reaching civic intervention with significant real-world effect.

Bon’s foray into environmental reparation in L.A. commenced with Not A Cornfield (2005–6), an industrious work that reimagined an unused brownfield rail yard in Chinatown as a thriving thirty-two-acre cornfield for a single agricultural cycle. This gesture echoes the visionary work of Hungarian American artist Agnes Denes, who, in the summer of 1982, cultivated a two-acre wheat field on the Battery Park landfill in Manhattan, meticulously planting and harvesting it by hand (Wheatfield — A Confrontation). Denes’ wheatfield and, later, Bon’s cornfield, evidence a shift toward art that grapples with anthropogenic disaster. The following year, in his book Art in the Landscape: A Critical Anthology (1983), environmental artist Alan Sonfist asked a question that had become ever more pertinent: “It may be important at the end of the twentieth century to ask ‘In what direction are artists leading our society?’”¹⁵

Bon’s practice heralds a pivotal moment in the evolving continuum of contemporary art—where the demarcations between art, ecological stewardship, and community engagement dissolve, becoming more fluid and permeable. The neon proclamation borrowed from Sherrie Rabinowitz pictured on Metabolic Studio’s homepage, “Artists Need to Create On the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy,” frames a provocative dialectic: It pits the scale of individual artistic agency against the broader scale of societal impact, advocating for a balance of creative power that harnesses the collective’s capacity for change. In doing so, it veers artists away from the spectacle of enormity (no more Levitating Masses!). Wright’s ethos of art with a factor of one envisions art harmonized with the world at a 1:1 scale, rendering it potentially indistinguishable from day-to-day functionality.¹⁶

Within a 1:1 framework, art transcends its traditional guise, integrating with life’s infrastructure and acting as a lever for social and infrastructural transformation—as Bending the River’s literal reconfiguration of urban anatomy (through acts as tangible as cutting concrete or rerouting pipelines) vividly exemplifies. This register of activity entails maneuvering within legislative and bureaucratic systems, wrestling space between science, art, and policy, where questions of ethical governance and oversight remain essential. As initiatives like Test-Plot, 7th Ave Garden, and Bending the River continue to advocate for a transition from private ownership to collective stewardship, harnessing art to redefine land use, the framing devices through which we come to comprehend such gestures must keep pace with an ethics of accountability. At this critical ecological juncture, the impetus to envision a restructured future in the aftermath of colonial land appropriation must translate into tangible reparation and restitution. Only through such transformative pursuits can the art community play an instrumental role in the larger journey toward equitable land stewardship practices.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 36.

The Fifty-One Miles team walking along a stretch of the Los Angeles River in Burbank, California, August 2023. Image courtesy of Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) and Nova Community Arts. Photo: Rio Asch Phoenix.

Volta Collective, Eva and Julian have a conversation (performance view) (2024). Performance in David Hammons, 7th Ave Garden, Los Angeles, March 2, 2024. Organized by JOAN and David Horvitz. Image courtesy of the artists and JOAN. Photo: Olivia Fougeirol.

David Hammons (installation view) (2024). 7th Ave Garden, Los Angeles, February–March 2024. Organized by JOAN and David Horvitz. Image courtesy of the artists and JOAN. Photo: Olivia Fougeirol.

Emma Kemp is a writer and researcher working across disciplines. Emma is an Assistant Professor at Otis College of Art & Design with an extensive history in publishing and arts organizing. She is represented by Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

More by Emma Kemp