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II. Making art that matters

Bee: Most of the women art majors were pissed off about the blatant sexism that we experienced in our education. Rarely did we see the art of women in our art history lectures, and we had no female professors. There was also blatant homophobia, and very few BIPOC [Black and Indigenous people of color] artists came to work with us. We were inspired by The Feminist Art Program at CalArts to organize and engage our anger as a sit-down strike in our art department chair’s office. Amazingly, we were successful at getting funds for many initiatives. By the time I returned to the school, ten years later, as a visiting artist, the whole art department had shifted to 50 percent female professors. It was very rewarding to witness the positive impact of our organizing.

I graduated with a BA in 1975, went to New York City, then received a free graduate education and teaching fellowship at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), where I got my MFA. Having no debt when I graduated was a great benefit that many young artists don’t have. My time at NSCAD networked me with curators, writers, and artists in New York, so I was offered many opportunities that most people don’t have when they leave grad school. I was making art about personal issues that were political, and it was well received.

Ruth: We were both asking questions about how to make art that matters. Both of us were able to move from personal story to larger societal stories while combining the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. Do you want to give some examples of that in your work?

Bee: During graduate school, I started working with my dreams as subject matter, and I was having lots of nightmares about nuclear war. What emerged from a series of experiments was the audio installation, This Is Not a Test. It was exhibited many times, and the response to the work taught me that many people were having similar nightmares. During an artist residency at Blue Mountain Center in 1983, a fascinating accident in the library brought the work of Joanna Macy into my life. Her book fell on my head. Working with her shifted the trajectory of my work.

Joanna’s Despair and Empowerment book and workshops (now called The Work that Reconnects) invited me to fully feel my grief and transform it into action with the power of the collective. Since then, doing projects that compel others to share their stories has been a strong motivation for my creative process.

Many of my projects have been interactive over the years, and collaborations with my late husband, Bob Spivey, impacted the content of my work and deepened my practice as an ecoartist. We co-taught “Activist Art in Community” at the Institute for Social Ecology for over a decade, and then went on to collaborate on several projects, including my first permaculture design project on Vashon Island in Washington State, Eden Reframed. It featured a food forest, a demonstration of how to bio-remediate toxic soil, and a story hive where gardeners and farmers could share what inspires them to plant seeds in a time of ecological crisis. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Bob and I co-facilitated the Tacoma Story Hive to help neighbors and the larger community share stories about the challenges they were facing, the skills they were learning, and their dreams for the future we can co-create. The hive continues to gather stories to this day.

Ruth: I think interactivity is a powerful part of your work. You are skillful in weaving image and story. Creating resonance between multiple layers of story and image to present multiple truths has been an important strategy for me as well.

I didn’t go to graduate school until I was thirty. Moving to Southern California from the Bay Area to go to the University of California, San Diego felt like moving to the end of the earth, even though I had gone to high school in Los Angeles. I made several pieces that examined real estate advertising strategies that imported fantasies from all over the world, with no recognition of the local indigenous cultures. In San Diego, boundaries were either too loose or too tight, with both sprawling suburbs and gated communities, and more importantly, the border fence, which has now become a border wall.

Working in collaborative groups has also been important to me. After graduate school, I was teaching at Southwestern College, a community college near the border. We started a reading group that eventually became an art-making group, Las Comadres. In response to Light Up the Border, demonstrations where people shined their headlights onto the border, which at that point was just a barbed wire fence, we hired a plane carrying a banner with the words, “A thousand points of fear, another Berlin Wall,” and spoke to both protesters and counter-protesters about their motivations. Later, we started telling our grandmother’s stories sitting around a campfire in someone’s backyard. We built an installation, La Vecindad (the neighborhood), and a performance, Border Boda (wedding), sharing personal stories in a colorful kitchen that contrasted with the media representations of the border in the black and white conflict room. It’s disheartening to see where we were then, and how the situation has, in many senses, deteriorated.

Bee: There’s a lot of devolution that’s very visible in the mainstream, whether it’s about ecocide, human rights, or war, but there are many initiatives happening under the radar to give us inspiration. I have gratefully left my academic position. Now I am carving out a very different path for myself as a teacher, an artist, and a writer. I want to be of service by helping people tell their stories. It can be very healing for communities that are polarized.

III. Our current practices

Bee: Once I left academia in 2020, I knew it was time to start writing my next book: a fractured memoir that includes creative emergent strategies to inspire cultural activists in this time. This fall, I was invited to facilitate a program at the Seattle Public Library called Art as Medicine for Catastrophic and Transformative Times. I offered two public lectures. The first one focused on my socially engaged art practice and what unexpected recognition taught me. I shared how community-based art practices became crucial to me and how my journey in academia, subverting the traditional studio art curriculum, was also very useful. The second lecture was a slideshow that focused on art practices that connect with the communities around us, both human and more than human. I provided examples of creative emergent strategies that can inform the way we experience the sacred in the present moment and reimagine the future. From disobedient art interventions to projects that focus on community dialogue, these rituals can help us process grief and celebrate what might be invisible.

As part of our work together, we visited the LandBack project at The Heron’s Nest, a permaculture design restoration project created with support from the Duwamish Tribe in West Seattle. I will be collaborating with Aloysious Todd, the restoration lead, who is also facilitating many events that include cultural activism. Participants in that workshop were awestruck by the magic of working on the land, being of service to a tribe that has struggled to survive, and how food justice and creative resistance are woven together in one place.

Our future workshops will be hybrid, online and in person, and will feature a grounding meditation and visualizations to bring in tools from our ancestors who have gone through catastrophic times. We will discuss different approaches for mapping the skills and challenges found in our neighborhoods, and we’ll draw and map what we inventory. We will brainstorm ways to create site-specific events, rituals, or collaborations that are compelling and inviting. We will map the histories that might lead us to do this practice. Those histories may include ancestry, education, life experiences, fears, visions, and traumas that inform our value systems. We will reach out to community organizers to learn more about the history and initiatives that have emerged from the grassroots.

Facilitation and writing seem to be my primary art forms now. I am offering a workshop for a cohort supported by the Russell Family Foundation this week. I’m going to be bringing in practices that come from meditation, my improv experience, and my years as a dancer. There will also be writing, collage, and altar building. Diverse forms can touch different parts of the imagination and spirit, and thus, offer powerful responses to confront the catastrophes we face in this time.

In my individual creative practice, I will continue to make work as a form of play, resistance, and healing. I’m still going to be creating rituals in my garden and doing under-the-radar things. I don’t need the same kind of validation that I craved when I was younger, although I still need to be in community, collaborate, and learn from others. The legacy that I would like to be able to offer is to train people in a process that they can use. I don’t need to make more things. I don’t need to add more lines to my resume, but I do want to finish my fractured memoir this year.

Ruth: What you’re doing sounds very exciting, very you, synthesizing all the interests that you’ve developed while teaching, which has been a large part of your life, but now doing it on your own terms, rather than for institutions that often thwarted your vision. You’re integrating the recent work that you’ve been doing with improv, working with ancestors, and all the different podcasts you keep telling me about, which I so appreciate. You’re bringing it forward and creating with a group of people. It sounds wonderful!

I am in a somewhat different place. I feel passionate about sharing my art as a way of communicating about vital issues. As a member of FIG, Feminist Image Group, I just contributed to an exhibition on censorship for the San Diego Central Library. and co-facilitated a workshop on artists’ books. I feel that sharing my photomontages of living and dying trees, contextualized with text or interactive components, can help motivate actions to slow the climate and extinction crises.

Bee: Yes, but you’re talking about spaces that are public spaces, not art galleries.

Ruth: Actually, my current practice of walking with dying trees, bearing witness to trees impacted by urbanization, globalization in the form of introduced species, and climate change in all its guises—from drought, beetles to fire—began as a very private practice. Or maybe “private” is the wrong word. I started by reaching out to trees, not people. I walked the same paths to listen deeply, to establish relationships with trees, with place. I felt that I needed to fully immerse myself in the experience of being present before articulating my learning in writing and images. In the process, I have developed ongoing conversations with several scientists and land managers. Gradually, I’ve created interactive installations, given a number of public readings or performative lectures, invited people to walk with me, and organized workshops. I would like to do more of all of the above. I am also writing a book that details my developing relationships with trees.

Two years ago, I was invited to the Netherlands, where I created Learning to Think Like a Forest, an exhibition followed by an outdoor installation and website, which shared stories about trees who had been carried around the world and asked questions about their futures. I included the story of a sequoia planted down the street from the exhibition, conceiving of the tree as a sentinel who invites contemplation of ecological well-being. That led to other interactive projects that asked how we can commit to nurturing the sequoia seedlings sprouting after recent fires for the next millennium. Effectively inviting response and eliciting dialogue feels very important to me. I’m certainly inspired by your Story Hives.

IV. Talking with the trees and the “no enemy” way

Bee: When I was at Breitenbush Hot Springs recently, during a dinner meal, I sat next to a couple who work in forestry locally and manage what gets cut and harvested and what gets planted. I very deliberately did not tell them anything about my work as an ecoartist because I felt uncomfortable with that kind of conversation in that context. I did ask them how they felt about the fires. They said they were fairly close, that it was scary. I didn’t want to see them as the enemy. I’m curious how you think about that.

Ruth: I think that listening carefully, trying to live the “no enemy way,” is very important. It comes up for me repeatedly in conversations about restoration practices after high-intensity fires, such as those that killed sequoias in the Sierras, which burn into the crowns of trees and are said to destroy their seed sources. Is it beneficial to clear dead trees or the native vegetation that is adapted to grow quickly after fire, but is said to crowd out new seedlings? Is it helpful to plant seedlings, which may not be sourced locally, or are those that germinate naturally sufficient? How many seedlings are enough to assure that some will survive? Nobody knows. We’ve never experienced current climatic conditions. It’s devastating to stand in a forest of huge blackened trees. We are in a time of tremendous uncertainty. Uncertainty understandably gives rise to fear. However, reacting from fear and the panic that immediate action is required often means repeating the very practices, such as those developed by the logging industry, which helped to create current ecological conditions. Instead, it is important to learn to stay present with the grief and not knowing, to walk and sit with trees and try to listen to what they are telling us.

Bee: The authoritarians in power want us to be scared all the time. We must do everything we can to pull those fear tentacles out of our brains daily. I have friends who left the country. That’s one trauma response. That doesn’t mean that the problems go away, that the brutality goes away. I told a friend in LA that you must do everything you can to focus on beauty and love every day, and build solidarity with neighbors.

Ruth: That’s so true. When I lead meditations for the trees, I don’t only focus on feeling our love for the trees but also on feeling the trees loving us. There is incredible power in feeling that we live in a loving world. The autocrats are giving an antithetical message, as you said, instilling fear. But love, compassion, and working in community are the basis of healing and change.

Bee: To reinforce that, the book The Light Eaters talks about new research explaining how plants and trees respond to the world through vibration. They don’t need a nervous system to recognize that their owner or caregiver is absent. They can vibrate in relationship to the energy of their caregiver from some distance. It makes me think about how many things I take for granted. Instead of seeing the everyday as mundane, we need to see it as sacred. Reclaiming the animate world continues to be an anchor for me. Practices such as growing food for my neighbors and celebrating the sacred gifts from my garden grounds me despite the unfolding collapse around us.

Ruth: Yes, I have so many questions about restoration practices that are based on seeing plants in competition with each other without recognizing the networks of mycorrhizae through which plants exchange nutrients and information. The whole world in which we live is sacred!

The last time I went walking with trees, I felt confrontational energy from a young oak that I was sitting with. At one point, there was an ICE helicopter flying overhead. I felt the energy of the oak saying, “With all your eagles in the sky, can’t you see? Drill baby drill, from the ozone layer to melting permafrost, how many holes before you take down many of us with you?”

While I’m sure that there are some things that I am blind to, I live with the fear and broken heart from all that I do perceive. The field in which the oak tree was growing was both dotted with the remains of their elders who had been killed by the Goldspotted oak borer, and resplendent with the colors of late spring—pink cliff roses, purple lupines, white yarrow, and so much more. Our work as artists is to meet the world in which we find ourselves, to honor the uncertainty, grief, and anger that we feel, while providing space for joy, play, and reimagining the worlds of the future.