3:30pm – 4:30: Join the Lichen Pipeline, a participatory art performance celebrating lichens as important contributors to our terrestrial ecosystems. Come to the center of the South Oval to collaborate with the Lichen Likers as we braid, tie, and link together to embody a kind of sculptural support system that brings lichen and humans together as “biological infrastructure”.
At 4:30pm all participants are invited to line up and join the parade to continue extending the Lichen Pipeline further.
Location: Middle of the South Oval. Look for our fabric braids and parade float with tree branches
4:30pm – 5:30pm: Parade starts from the South Oval. We will walk single file along the blue line, which marks the underground stream of Neil Run. Our procession will continue to follow the historic Neil Run waterway, beyond the Ohio Union, and into the neighborhoods to the East of High Street, to end at Iuka Ravine – where the water that once flowed there has left an enduring mark on the land.
The Liken Likers are presenting at, “What’s Lichen?” a Lichen Symposium at the University of Minnesota. As part of the Culture, Healing, Art, Technology, Nature (CHANT) collaborative, Doosung Yoo and Amy Youngs from our group, have been involved with helping to plan this event. The keynote speaker is Laurie Palmer, author of The Lichen Museum, a book that has been central to our work. There will also be art, lichen walks, lichen scientist conversations, movement workshops, and interdisciplinary conversations on “learning with lichens” and speculative futures. See our full schedule of events.
Event: This talk and movement-based workshop explore queer ecological perspectives and experiences of embodiment that disrupt normative constructions of the body as bounded, separate, and impermeable. We will discuss and practice strategies for developing a greater felt sense of our own bodies as well as how our felt sense of self expands or transforms through moving in and out of intentional relationships with other bodies—both human and more-than-human. Who and how else might we become as we traverse promiscuous embodied relations through our movement? What more becomes possible when we invite human and more-than-human others into our bodies through moving together? How might these experiences shape not only how we approach ourselves and one another, but also our collective movements and our relationship with a planet in crisis? No previous movement experience needed.
Biography: Michael J. Morris is a dance artist, astrologer, tarot reader, writer, and educator. They hold a PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University, and they were a Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University from 2015-2021 where they taught in Dance, Women’s and Gender Studies, Queer Studies, and Environmental Studies. They were also visiting faculty at SNDO—the School for New Dance Development—at the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam from 2020-2023. Michael’s choreographic and performance work draws influences from Japanese Butoh, ritual practices, and early formalist postmodern dance and has been presented at universities, galleries, community spaces, theaters, bars and nightclubs, films, and domestic spaces. In 2019, Michael founded Co Witchcraft Offerings through which they offer astrology and tarot consultations, movement-based rituals, and workshops to support people in cultivating more meaningful living while pursuing personal and collective healing and liberation.
As a symbiotic being, lichen’s fungal partner learns to collaborate with their green, photosynthetic partner. How can we practice collaborating closely with plants in their living form? Can we wear them without harming them? What do we take? What do we give?
Join our experimental, hands-on workshop with Alex Buchan, to explore making wearables with living plants.
Alex Buchan works as a prospector, excavating modern masculinity through sculptures and installations to present a caring, queer alternative that prioritizes empathy and resilience. His constructions of recontextualized objects and building materials combined with large scale prints offer windows into social webs that are often overlooked. As part of his ongoing symbiosis with the Lichen Likers, he focuses on ways to utilize waste stream materials to support life, with vestments that encourage us to think about the ways we interact with plants on a daily basis. He received his BFA in Sculpture from The Ohio State University, and is currently pursuing his MFA at Ohio University.
The Fungal Entanglement project is going to New York City! The Lichen Likers have been selected for this year’s Art in Odd Places festival. Look for us along 14th Street in NYC and please do join us in our web, as we seek to discover lichens and other non-humans in the urban environment. We will be there on Saturday and Sunday, October 19 & 20th.
Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2024: CARE is curated by Patricia Miranda and Christopher Kaczmarek. Curatorial Manager: Valentina Zamora. Producer: Robin Schatell. Founder & Director: Ed Woodham. Art in Odd Places is an annual festival that presents visual and performance art in public spaces along 14th Street in Manhattan, NYC from Avenue C to the Hudson River each October. Active in New York City since 2005, AiOP aims to stretch the boundaries of communication in the public realm by presenting artworks in all disciplines outside the confines of traditional public space regulations. Using 14th Street as a laboratory, this project continues AiOP‘s work to locate cracks in public space policies and to inspire the popular imagination for new possibilities and engagement with civic space.
The Lichen Likers performing in this festival include: Alex Buchan, Amy Youngs, Anna Arbogast, Doosung Yoo, Jiara Sha, Madison Blue. We are part of a larger human organism, emerging from the Living Art & Ecology Lab at the Ohio State University. We are learning with lichens and drawing inspiration from their resilient, collaborative, and queer lifestyles. Embodying the symbiosis of fungi and algae, we create art that gives voice to this overlooked, communal lifeform.
Join the Living Art & Ecology Lab’s funded project, “Learning Lichens“. This is an artistic research project supported by the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme of Care, Culture, and Justice. The project aims to promote public awareness of the valuable relationship between humans, non-humans, and our shared environment through combining art and science practices. We will explore alternative lived environments and new approaches to understanding non-human ‘others’ through learning about multiplicity from lichens: symbiotic beings made of fungus, algae, and relationships with other organisms. This project is a continuation of the Lichen Likers project from 2024.
We are hiring six (6) Student Research Assistants to collaborate with faculty and staff in exploring the topic described above. Four (4) student assistants will focus on workshop development and art research while two (2) will focus on the media design through digital documentation and storytelling.
Job duties and responsibilities for the student research assistant team include:
Participating in creative research and artmaking using various techniques such as sculpture, fabrication, installation, performance, storytelling, 3D modeling, photogrammetry, microscopy.
Developing and hosting events relating to the project (such as hands-on public workshops and art exhibitions) and assisting in curatorial work for planning exhibition themes and open calls
Documenting and sharing the progress of this project through website design, blog posts and other engagement on social media
Student Research Assistants will have opportunities for field-based learning and artmaking experiences.
Requirements:
Good communication skills and ability to work on collaborative projects
An interest and engagement in the intersection of art and science
Able to attend weekly team meetings on campus once per week (usually on Fridays) and two lichen identification training workshops at the start of the project
At least one of the following:
Experience in at least one artistic medium such as but not limited to: performance, sculpture, 3D modeling, ceramics, sound art, costuming, etc. (art research + workshop focus)
Experience with photo / video / audio software and hardware for documenting and editing (media design focus)
Experience with storytelling as well as creating digital and physical promotional materials (flyers, social media posts, website publications, etc.) (media design focus)
Students interested in one of the two media design-focused positions should submit an online portfolio of work (include your URL in your CV or cover letter).
The Living Art & Ecology Lab supports faculty and students conducting research in the intersections of art, biology, sensory imaging, ecology, environmental arts and humanities, biomimicry, sustainability, and anthropology, amongst others. This space supports diverse and expansive creative research related to environmental justice, human/non-human interactions, and sustainable futures, with an emphasis on restorative and equitable practices in the arts and life sciences.
The Lichen Likers art research group spent the last year studying lichen and practicing creative methods for spreading and sporulating this knowledge. We are learning with lichens and drawing inspiration from their symbiotic lifestyles (a non-binary association of fungi and photosynthetic partners).
Symbiosis, interdependence, hospitality, and caring about our non-human kin were the key concepts for this Fungal Entanglement performance. We practiced audience participation, group movements, and focusing attention on the presence and lifestyles of lichen. The fabric sculpture represents fungi and the way that it grows flexible, symbiotic networks that enable mutually beneficial exchanges with plants and other species.
Fungal Entanglement artists: Anna Arbogast, Madison Blue, Alex Buchan, Xiuer Gu, Elias Marquez, Jiara Sha, Doo-sung Yoo, and Amy Youngs.
An Earth Day art exhibition in a greenhouse on top of a parking garage.
The Biological Sciences Greenhouse mimics the warming effects of the Earth’s atmosphere to nurture a cornucopia of plant diversity and botanical research. On April 22nd from 8:00-10:00pm, it will also serve as a cultural hotbed to present an exhibition of phytophilic (plant-loving) art. This venue is uniquely situated atop a central parking garage on Ohio State University’s campus, carbon dioxide from the exhaust of humans and cars below drifting upwards to the plants who transform it into oxygen.
The Lichen Likers research group, the Living Art & Ecology Lab, seven invited local artists, and this semester’s Art & Science course (co-taught by faculty members Amy Youngs and Iris Meier) cordially invite you to experience their artistic creations at this plant-human meeting ground. In an age of rapidly changing climate, the greenhouse is not the only hothouse of our own making. The artists of this exhibition are united by the question, what solutions to our warming climate may we learn from paying attention to plants and their symbiotic partners?
Not sure how to get to the greenhouse? The Lichen Likers will be leading a group from Hopkins Hall to the Greenhouse as part of a participatory pre-show performance titled Fungal Entanglement: A Lichen Journey. Arrive on the steps of Hopkins Hall at 7pm for a meandering walk that will lead you to the show.
This exhibition is presented by the Living Art and Ecology Lab, with support from the Humanities Institute, the Biological Sciences Greenhouse, and the Department of Molecular Genetics at The Ohio State University
