A Visit to the Lichen Museum with Laurie Palmer

The Lichen Museum project draws inspiration from the radical habits of lichens to explore parallel considerations for human becoming. With lichens as muse, the Lichen Museum nurtures and develops actions and perspectives that support collectivity and undermine individualism, profit-motivation, time-equals-money, and presumed human dominance of the material world. As a conceptual frame to slow and redirect attention, the Lichen Museum invites you to zero in on inhabitants of the sidewalks and river bank ecologies; enter slowed, horizontal, colorful and complex worlds that co-exist with those of capitalist urgency but are mostly overlooked or stepped on.

About Laurie Palmer
A. Laurie Palmer is a Professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is currently Director of Graduate Studies for the Environmental Art and Social Practice MFA program at UCSC. Her place-based, research-oriented artworks take form as sculpture, installations, and public projects, and she collaborates on strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. Her book In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction (2014) investigates what happens to places where materials are removed from the ground, and, once liberated, how these materials move between the earth and our bodies. Her book, The Lichen Museum, imagines the earth as an inside-out museum, free and always open, teaching us to develop our powers of attention, observation, and listening, and undermining the human-centered hierarchies that value certain forms of life and being over others.

Part of the Refocusing Ecology Workshop Series, sponsored by the City Arts Recovery Design (CARD) Program of City of Santa Cruz.