Performing in Art in Odd Places

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. 

Lichen Likers art exhibition

In A Hotter House

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?

Address: Biological Sciences Greenhouse, 332 W. 12th Avenue Columbus, Ohio 43210. Directions.

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.

Video documentation of exhibition.