Anne Percoco

Seeds: Containers of a World to Come at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, open through July 28, 2025.

https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/on-view/on-view/seeds-containers-of-a-world-to-come-2025

At a moment when ecological concerns are becoming increasingly urgent, Seeds: Containers of a World to Come brings into dialogue work by ten contemporary artists whose research-based practices are defined by sustained inquiry into plant–human–land relations. For the artists Shiraz Bayjoo, Carolina Caycedo, Juan William Chávez, Beatriz Cortez, Ellie Irons, Kapwani Kiwanga, Jumana Manna, Anne Percoco, Cecilia Vicuña, and Emmi Whitehorse, the seed is the kernel, literally and metaphorically, of their investigations into issues of fragility, preservation, and possibility in the face of the global climate crisis.

More info about our installation:
https://nextepochseedlibrary.com/kemper/

The Next Epoch Seed Library will have a sculpture and special collection of seeds in a show opening this February, "Seeds: Containers of a World to Come" at Mildred Lane Kemper Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, curated by Meredith Malone and Svea Braeunert. The exhibition brochure is attached. Ellie and I are thrilled to share NESL in this context!

McCall, Tris, "At EONTA Space, Three Artists Roll With the Changing Season," Jersey City Times.

https://jcitytimes.com/at-eonta-space-three-artists-roll-with-the-changing-season/

Date and time
Sunday, September 29 · 3 - 5pm EDT

Location
The Climate Imaginarium
406A Comfort Road New York, NY 11231

Part of Imagined Futures: This is Your City Climate Week Program and City-Wide Scavenger Hunt

Join us to close out Climate Week with intention as we gather to honor place and possibility. on Governors `Island. With an optional ferry talk to get us there with elder and longtime activist Jk Canepa and youth organizer Anna Tsomo with youth from 6th St Community Climate Action group.

Governors island is full of complicated history. Once stewarded by the Lenape peoples, it was sold to the Dutch in the context of a violent colonial take-over, and housed the military for years as a place of strategic defense. For years it was a fallow as anywhere in NY until the slow artistic and cultural residencies made inroads to a future of massive development. In the layer cake of complication, there is much to honor, grieve and hold for the whole future of our city and world.

In collaboration with the American Indian Community House and Climate Imaginarium, we'll be joined by Ellie Irons and Anne Percoco of Next Epoch Seed Library and held by Noelle Ghoussaini of SacredSpace to lead us in the closing ritual.

All are welcome!

Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/grief-seeds-a-closing-gathering-for-climate-week-2024-tickets-1005397560167

Next Epoch Seed Library has contributed a special collection of Gowanus plants to this event produced by the Holes in the Wall Collective

Ever wondered about what we can learn from the plants that have survived our worst behaviors - the so called weeds that can thrive in industrial sludge, the hidden edible botanicals determined to grow amid the changing climate and landscape?

Join us this Saturday June 29th 2-5pm for a performance walking tour of the rapidly changing Gowanus -- focusing on social justice, rezoning, and wild weeds surviving the canal! A beautiful day with guided tours/plant walks, pop-up performance and a mostly foraged meal from @the_c_u_r_b

Led by long standing neighborhood eco-art perfomance company Artichoke Dance and plant stewards Journei Bimwala and Candance Thompson. Including a stop at the GCC Lowlands Nursery with special guest seed library popup from Next Epoch Library and concluding with a special micro Collaborative Urban Resiliance Banquet, a delicious light meal made form mainly foraged ingredients. Biochar aioli on acorn muffins anyone? Yes please.

Finish the day with a glass of our Linden Lemon Balm Saison, a collaboration with Wild East Brewery, with proceeds going to support the work of Journei and 4 other creative climate folks doing the work in NYC.

Tickets and details HERE (select ticket for 6/29):
https://www.artichokedance.org/events/2024/6/29/immersive-performance-tours-along-the-gowanus-canal

Image (detail): Plant Collection BKL – Two Machines used in the Brown Coal Ditches – 30.05.2017. Work by Camilla Berner, 2017. Courtesy of the Artist.

RUDERAL FUTURES
Camilla Berner, Andrea Callard, Lindsey french, Yvette Granata, Next Epoch Seed Library, Shuling Yuan and Ingo Vetter
Curated by Alex Young
11 March - 30 April, 2022
SixtyEight Art Institute welcomes you to our new exhibition, Ruderal Futures, organised by the American artist/curator Alex Young with artists Camilla Berner, Andrea Callard, Lindsey french, Yvette Granata, Next Epoch Seed Library, Shuling Yuan and Ingo Vetter. This ecocritical futures exhibition continues our two-year program of exhibitions, called Memoirs of Saturn that is looking into new relations between art, nature, and prosperity in a warming world.

Opening: Friday 11 March, 18:00-21:00

Location: Gothersgade 167

Ruderal Futures is an ongoing research project that articulates a manifest proposition: inherited world systems – of colonial biopower, of capitalism, of modernity – can, will, and are ending. Subsequently, from the weeds of their ruin, a new more-than-human collective ‘we’ might emerge enriched.

Adapted from urban ecology, the word ‘ruderal’ refers to plants and other life-forms that populate environments disturbed by natural phenomena and human activity. However, more broadly, the ruderal exists both within and beyond the forces of state planning and capitalism’s project of organising nature, simultaneously holding a mirror to dominant systems while pointing towards forms of resistance and utopian otherness. By order of magnitude, it is less a product of human relations with their environment than the profound alteration of the earth’s surface that results from the hierarchical systems exceeding the agency of individuals and multitudes alike. Here, the ruderal emerges as a distinct minor territory and incidental model for futurity, gleaned from the wilful omission of a holistic conception of multispecies collaboration.

This exhibition evolves from an open-ended milieu of artist-researchers engaged with ruderal ecologies, who are here gathered to address the potential of weedy others as co-creators of alter-worlds of abundance. Using this platform, their contributions evoke plausible worlds of nonhierarchical kinship from the aftermath of both historic and ongoing colonial violence and capitalist anthropogenic land use. In this sense, Ruderal Futures presents a constellation of research-based practices assembled as an anarchive of intersecting citational affinities. Together, this exhibition unfolds in a form of space and time travel, where past, present, and future encounters – once dispersed over vast terrestrial divides – coalesce into this auspicious site of germination.

For SixtyEight Art Institute, works by Camilla Berner, Andrea Callard, Lindsey french, Yvette Granata, Next Epoch Seed Library, and Shuling Yuan and Ingo Vetter span over three continents and nearly five decades–from the 1970s to today. Each artist employs means of ruderal sensing in active examination of the heterogeneity of urban life. Their contributions present creative registers or proposals addressing countless entanglements between both human and other-than-human actors. The resultant projects materialise in practices of care, receptivity, and awareness toward subaltern spaces, species, and subjectivities that reside in the margins of authority and prevailing rigid disciplinary interests. Adopting diverse media and methods of social and ecological analysis, the artists presented here are united in genuine post-disciplinary and post-medium processes of interrelation.

Via these approaches, the artists in Ruderal Futures move on from narratives of scarcity, utility, productivity, and growth that shape extractive means of tapping environmental surroundings as resources. In doing so, they expose modes of being-with-the-world that are efflorescing out of the complex and contaminated gardens of these alien commons.

More info: https://madmimi.com/p/ffb4931?pact=309833-166783285-12669623201-0d95a379ca12eefef1824b50ad4ce8c657d019d6

I recently finished a family residency at beautiful Stoneleaf Retreat, along with Ellie Irons as Next Epoch Seed Library. Photos are from studio visit with Helen Toomer, the director. Ellie and I each brought our toddlers, spouses, and parents/in-laws. What a great way to support female artists and mothers.

https://fluxhawaii.com/the-virtue-of-weeds/

by Timothy A. Schuler

"The pandemic has forced many of us to reevaluate our relationships to productivity. I’ve come to see that our cultural and aesthetic preference for landscapes that are neat and tidy is part of a larger cult of order and optimization. Weeds intrude on the narrative that we have it all together. We may not always recognize what a particular fallow period—whether an afternoon, or the interminable pause in which we currently find ourselves—is providing. But claiming time for ourselves is, itself, an act of liberation. As the artist Anne Percoco put it, 'Weeds serve their own purposes.'"

Our Green New Deal: A Community-University Working Session for Environmental Justice In the Passaic River Watershed, Rutgers Newark School of Arts & Sciences, Newark, NJ

https://sasn.rutgers.edu/our-green-new-deal-community-university-working-session-environmental-justice-passaic-river-watershed

https://sasn.rutgers.edu/our-green-new-deal-community-university-working-session-environmental-justice-passaic-river-watershed-session-1

For the Next Epoch Seed Library, I’ve installed Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory at two sites at Seton Hall University, in concert with the exhibition, New World Water, opening in November, and curated by Samantha Becker and Jeanne Brasile. I’ll be monitoring these sites through the fall and documenting what species grow.

The Next Epoch Seed Library is grateful to receive a grant from the Puffin Foundation to fund our 2019 activities.

https://gardencollage.com/inspire/art-design/project-vortex-designers-artists-architects-collaborate-prevent-plastic-waste/

For the past two weeks I’ve been in residence at Mass MoCA’s Studios. I’m revisiting my Parallel Botany project, extrapolating the leaves into whole plants, via collage. Photos by Dylan McLaughlin.

http://massmoca.org/event/studios/