Seeds and a dish with chicken and berries on a decorative table

David Horvitz performs at Soup & Tart: Los Angeles, June 8, 2023.

Active Cultures is a public arts organization in Los Angeles exploring the confluence of food and art through public projects, programs, and publishing.

Upcoming Projects

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Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien: Langit Lupa (Heaven and Earth)

An ongoing artist residency

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Meech Boakye: Research Poems

A digital garden and artist project that will grow and flourish throughout the seasons

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FEATURED PROJECT

Let’s Become Fungal in David Horvitz’s 7th Avenue Garden

For her first visit to Los Angeles, Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez joined Active Cultures, David Horvitz, shanhuan manton, and many friends, collaborators, and the public for a regenerative community barbeque in David’s 7th Avenue Garden. Together we cooked mushrooms in the ground oven, ate tacos, fed the garden with food scraps, and talked fungi and crows.

Let’s Become Fungal!⁠ We can’t wait to see y

Let’s Become Fungal!⁠
We can’t wait to see you for a week-long series of programs and gatherings with Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez. Sign up at the links!⁠
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🌿 Thursday, May 2 ⁠
Volunteer Gardening Day: A day of gardening with David Horvitz, Terremoto, and Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez.⁠ We will dig a hole and talk crows and all things mycelial. ⁠
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🍄 Sunday, May 5⁠
Let’s Become Fungal in The Garden: A regenerative community barbeque in David Horvitz’s Garden.⁠ Mushrooms on skewers, readings, signings with Artbook, ⁠and more. ⁠
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Check our site for more details, including related events with our friends Exploring the Mycoverse, NeueHouse, and Metabolic Studio.⁠
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@myceliumasmethodology @davidhorvitz ⁠
@terremoto_landscape @mycoverse_⁠ @metabolicstudio @artbookhwla⁠
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Images: ⁠
1. Taken from David Horvitz’s iPhone photos upon typing the word “mushroom.” Courtesy of the artist. ⁠
2. David Horvitz’s Garden, courtesy of Terremoto and David Horvitz. ⁠
3. Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts (detail) by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez. ‎Valiz, October 24, 2023.⁠

Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez: A Micro-Residency is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

This Spring, writer and curator Yasmine Ostendorf-

This Spring, writer and curator Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez is spending time with Active Cultures to germinate a mycelial network between different ecological art practices in Los Angeles and beyond. ⁠
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Long invested in fungi and mycelium as a material––the ever-branching connecting threads of the fungal world––Ostendorf-Rodríguez invests in the potential in these rhizomatic networks to function as a potent metaphor for potential new systems, ways of thinking and behaviors. Inspired by the worlds of art and mycology, her work emphasizes multispecies collaboration, symbiosis, alliances, non-monetary resource exchange, decentralization, bottom-up methods and mutual dependency—all in line with the behavior of the mycelium. ⁠
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A week-long program of public activities and encounters will be the beginning of a long-term collaboration, strengthening ties and forming a support network of mutual exchange. We begin with artist David Horvitz, in conversation, digging, gardening, cooking, and more in his Garden.⁠
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Check our site for more details, including ancillary events with our friends Exploring the Mycoverse and more! ⁠
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Program details: follow the link!⁠
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Images: Let's Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez. ‎Valiz, October 24, 2023. Images from The Garden, courtesy of David Horvitz and Terremoto. ⁠
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@myceliumasmethodology @davidhorvitz @terremoto_landscape @mycoverse_

Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez: A Micro-Residency is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

We've been reflecting this week on In Close, a gat

We've been reflecting this week on In Close, a gathering of food and performance to close out "Barbara T. Smith: Proof" at @theicala⁠ in celebration of Smith's kaleidoscopic practice.⁠
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In an ode to the year of Barbara, to the squash and the seasons, to feeding and being fed, Pennypacker Riggs orchestrated a blend of sound, song, sculpture, and ritual action. In her words, the performance, I C U, invited audience into a realm that transcends traditional boundaries, unfolding as a melodic journey that is part concert, featuring bass flute (Rachel Beetz), cello (April Dawn Guthrie), a surprise electric guitar (Heidi Alexander); part hidden chorus (Jess Basta, Sarah Blank, Arlene Deradoorian, Hilda Rasula, and Stacy Wood); magic show; mythological theater; and a timestamp for transition. Per Pennypacker Riggs, I C U is not merely a spectacle: it is a reflection of the artist’s ongoing exploration of midlife and its complexities—a psychological odyssey that defies conventional notions of “crisis.”⁠
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The performance culminated in a moment of vulnerability as Riggs, saddled by her young child, crawls the length of Smith’s exhibition on her hands and knees: a solemn and silly bow to Smith that smudges the lines between public performer and private person.⁠
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Head to our link in bio to read more about the evenings program and watch a full video of the performance ✨️ ⁠
📷 @ginaclyne

We are hiring! Active Cultures is very pleased to

We are hiring! Active Cultures is very pleased to announce the 2024 Getty Marrow Curatorial Internship to support our artistic program in 2024.⁠
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Full job description and link to apply in our bio!⁠
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Kindly share this post with those who may be interested! We cannot wait to meet our applicants.⁠
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The Getty Marrow Curatorial Internship is a ten-week, full time position beginning in June 2024. An interest in contemporary art and performance, as well as food studies and foodways cultures, is preferred. Additional areas of interest might include community organizing, arts administration. AC will prioritize applicants who demonstrate strong writing and research skills; an enthusiasm for public art initiatives and supporting artists; and a willingness to learn, ask questions, challenge themselves, and work independently.⁠
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Image: @paigeemery_ performs at Soup & Tart: Los Angeles, June 8, 2023. Photo by @roadworkstudio.⁠
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#gettymarrowundergraduateinternship⁠
#gettymui⁠
#losangeles⁠
#activeculturesla⁠

This February 5-9, 2024, follow along with our IG

This February 5-9, 2024, follow along with our IG for Meech Boakye's final Story Residency! ⁠
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This Residency follows the fourth and final chapter of Meech's digital Garden, Research Poems, which you can explore at researchpoems.com. 🐑⁠
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Research Poems is a digital garden and artist project that will grow and flourish through four seasons. Over the next year, Boakye will investigate four different plants, foraged and gardened, in DIY cheese-making experiments. Beginning with Stinging Nettle and an introduction to foraging, each plant-centered chapter is grounded in transdisciplinary research shaped by the artist’s real-time exploration of the metonymic relationship between the digital and the non-digital. As the project continues, they will tend to this garden with notes from the field; poems written collaboratively with AI; recipes; sonic outpourings; and more. Herein, Boakye explores how gardens can offer a framework for cultivating experimental knowledge systems, embedded in the fragmented and temporal. Together these shifting parts generate a kind of “commons,” an assemblage of the digital, the speculative, and the ecological, to be explored with each visit to the garden.⁠
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Image: Meech Boakye, “Sheep at Sour Milk School” (2023).⁠ courtesy of the artist.

Announcing the fourth and final chapter of Researc

Announcing the fourth and final chapter of Research Poems by Meech Boakye! Visit the Garden at researchpoems.com, link in bio!⁠
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Research Poems: Together is the fourth and final chapter of Meech Boakye‘s two-year investigation of DIY cheese-making experiments. This digital garden began with Stinging Nettle and an introduction to foraging and now concludes with a rumination on failure, learning, and death. Boakye reflects on their experience at Sour Milk School; examines rennet and ritual; and makes ricotta. Together in the garden we graze and move through cycles instigated by inquiry, process, and flavor. ⁠
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Following this chapter, Boakye returns as our next Story Resident. View their first residency from Spring 2023 in our Instagram highlights!⁠
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Finally, a huge thank you to @ghostyboi for stewarding this beautiful and truly keystone project to The Garden series. More from Meech can be found on their Instagram and website, meechboakye.com.⁠
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Image: Sheep, Flock in Owens Valley, Ansel Adams (1941). Public Domain.

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