Art

Lichen Pipeline performance

| Amy Youngs

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 Lichen Pipeline

  • 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

Earth Day Parade

  • Location: Starts from Ohio State University South Oval, behind the Faculty Club.
  • 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.

Lichen Symposium

| Amy Youngs

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.

Earth Day Parade: Get Involved!

| clemente.49

You are cordially invited to the Living Art and Ecology Lab’s 2025 Earth Day Parade. Join the Lichen Likers in celebrating the Earth!

What: We are hosting a parade in honor of Earth Day and invite you to join us! Together with various classes, student organizations, and partners from across campus, the parade is composed of costumes, banners, and floats dedicated to the soil, air, and waters upon which we all depend for our shared existence. This event is a celebration of joy for everything that makes life on this floating blue marble possible!

When: April 22nd, 2025 at 4pm

Where: Meet on the South Oval. Parade starts at 4:30, from the East end of Mirror Lake and moving towards Iuka Ravine.

How: For a simple way to join, show up on the South Oval wearing blue, green, or brown to represent the Earth. Costumes relating to the spirit of the event are also encouraged. Interested in building a float, carrying a banner, or coordinating involvement for your student org? We request that you submit an interest form here and read the guidelines enclosed.

Who: Current collaborators in this celebration include the Living Art & Ecology Lab’s Lichen Likers and Lost Waters research groups; SUSTAINs Living Community; Facilities, Operations, and Development; Planning, Architecture, and Real Estate, The Emerging Technology Studio; Knowlton School of Architecture; The Soil Culture Group; Art 5101 Eco Art Class; Art 3001 and 4503 Glass Classes; Design 4650 Collaborative Design Studio

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”  –Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Living Wearables Workhop

| Amy Youngs

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.

Lichen, Like You – A Lively Exhibition

| clemente.49

Step into this installation. Take a long, slow breath. Become a part of the lichen world. Real and fabricated lichens embrace you, as part of the web of life.

The Lichen Likers are a human organism that is 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.

At the end of a busy semester at the Ohio State University, we made some time to share some of our group’s experiments in the Department of Art Open House.

Thank you to the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme for supporting our work!1

  1. https://globalartsandhumanities.osu.edu/research-funding/arts-creation ↩︎

The Lichen Likers Receive the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme Grant

| clemente.49

After a year of learning with lichens, we received the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme grant. The grant provides “funding that engages artists across the university in the creation of new, impactful, arts-led research and creative productions informed by cross-disciplinary methods and practices.1” The grant encompasses 16 Center + Institute collaborations, 40 department-level collaborations, and 250 affiliates (faculty and staff). The project is led by Department of Art Associate Professor Amy Youngs, Living Art and Ecology Lab Specialist Emma Kline, and Department of Art Lecturer Doo-Sung Yoo.

The grant allows the Lichen Likers, an interdisciplinary group of student, faculty, and staff, to further employ art as a research practice and intervention to engage with the intelligence of the more-than-human world, seeking insights into resolutions for the critical social, cultural, and environmental injustices that plague our anthropocentric society.

Fungal Entanglement Performance. Photograph: Dev Patel

“Learning Lichens: A Symbiotic Co-Creation” builds upon the existing artwork, workshops, and interdisciplinary connections we have developed over the 2023-2024 academic year. We continue to embody the ethos of collaboration that we have learned so far from studying lichen through following emergent learning practices, considering multiple epistemologies, and equitably supporting student co-collaborator efforts through multiple avenues for financial support.

  1. https://globalartsandhumanities.osu.edu/care-culture-justice ↩︎

Performing in Art in Odd Places

| Amy Youngs

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.