Gallery hours are Monday-Friday 11am-5pm, Saturday 12-5pm

Walk ins are welcome or you can make an appointment here. Masks are required at all times.

18th Street Arts Center is pleased to present the exhibition Radical Propagations curated by artist and researcher Maru García, and featuring the work of Alberto Tlatoa, Lucía Monge, Rashonda Bartney, Rebecca Youssef, and Yrneh Gabon, on view in the Propeller Gallery at 18th Street Arts Center’s Airport Campus (3026 Airport Ave. in Santa Monica) from March 21 – July 30, 2022.

Just as a plant can propagate through cuttings that can be replanted and encouraged to root in new soil, this exhibition includes the work of artists and activists whose practice focuses on splitting and sharing, on generating spaces for regeneration and resilience. Artist Maru García explores biosystems, interspecies relationships, and the capacity of living organisms (including humans) to act as remediators in contaminated sites. Her work highlights the importance of eco-aesthetics, where relationships and community are proposed as a way of building cultures of regeneration. Regenerative practices propose methods of building relationships and community from the bottom up. Actions that seem minuscule, when propagated by these means, achieve a scope that aggregates and grows deep, interconnected roots. The impulse to share knowledge, food, and ideas, can iterate and grow in unanticipated ways.

The artists that García has curated into this exhibition explore processes as diverse as guerrilla gardening, human-plant interspecies mobilizations, and the formation and distribution of seed libraries. But these artists also engage in repetitive manual works, harkening back to Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ concept of “Maintenance art”; art that is not noticed and whose impact is often not recognized. These are artists who compost, who cultivate, who maintain community gardens, living daily as radical propagators of cultures of regeneration.

For more information on this exhibition: https://18thstreet.org/event/radical-propagations-propagaciones-radicales/