3 Talks on Mending: Landon Newton
With a background in permaculture and horticulture, artist Landon Newton engages in historical research to create work that asks the audience to reconsider our relationship with plants in which ecology, reciprocity and circular thinking, are critical frameworks. In this talk we will discuss if and how interdependence and mending are related, hidden and underappreciated systems of care, and what plants, including what we deem as weeds and invasive species, can teach us.
Landon Newton is an artist, gardener, and independent researcher based in New York City. Her interdisciplinary practice considers the reciprocal relationships between plants and people. Landon has received numerous awards including the Socrates Annual Fellowship, LMCC Artist-in-Residence at Governors Island, and On Our Radar 2021, Creative Capital. Her work has been exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Frieze New York, and Queens Museum among others. Landon’s ongoing and collaborative project The Abortion Herb Garden explores the history and use of abortifacient, emmenagogic, and contraceptive herbs animated through site-specific installations, workshops, and publications.
Megumi Shauna Arai is an artist based in New York City. Investigating literal and metaphorical borders and the notion of belonging, her work sits at the intersection of textile and painting. Through the language of abstraction, by way of the physical process of folding and layering, her work focuses on points of encounter, betweenness as a practice of embodiment, and the material and immaterial as interconnected. Her work has been shown at LongHouse Reserve, Bridget Donahue Gallery, Management Gallery, Object & Thing at Madoo, Stone Barns Center, The Noyes House with Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing, Wing Luke Museum and Jacob Lawrence Gallery. Recent residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Library. Alternative pedagogy collaboration includes Field Meridians, an art-based urban ecology curriculum in Central Brooklyn and The Mothership, an eco-feminist art and ecology center founded by Yto Barrada in Tangier, Morocco. She is represented by Abby Bangser, founder of Object & Thing.