Several Los Angeles museums are leaning into Earth Month this April with exhibitions that put organic and living materials front and center, asking visitors to reconsider what it means for art to age, decay, and disappear.
The biggest draw is at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, where a new show called “Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials” brings together work by 22 artists from across the Americas. Sculptures, paintings, and collages built from avocado, cacao, flowers, stone, clay, sand, and natural dyes fill the galleries through Aug. 23. The exhibition pushes back against the assumption that art should last forever, treating change and decay as part of the work itself.
L.A.-based Mexican American artist Carmen Argote made two 16-foot-tall human-like figures that stop visitors cold the moment they walk in. She painted them without brushes, using her hands and feet dipped in a mixture of avocado, cochineal dye, and lemon juice. The paintings, titled “an archetype of stillness” and “an archetype of touch,” will shift color over the run of the show as the avocado dries, releases oil, and eventually breaks down the paper underneath.
Argote told LAist the process changed how she thinks about her own work. “This piece has taught me so much about letting go,” she said. “And really accepting the life of a material and life of an artwork.”
That’s a hard thing to sit with.
Also in the exhibition is Jackie Amézquita, another L.A.-based artist, whose piece “Cuerpos terrestres en fluidez,” or “Terrestrial Bodies in Fluidity,” uses the rammed earth technique, a building method that dates to the Neolithic period. Amézquita constructed a set of sculptures using decomposed granite from the Mojave Desert, lava rocks, obsidian, rain, and ocean water, then split them into fragments. The effect is deliberately unsettling, something ancient made, then broken.
Amézquita’s thinking cuts right to the core of what the show is asking. “There’s this idea that we have of nature to not be permanent when it’s actually older than us,” she said. Her use of those raw desert materials, she told LAist, raises questions about permanence that are “just an echo to what life is.”
She didn’t stop there. “That is part of our human condition,” Amézquita said. “We’re always confronted with the idea of life and death.”
The first Earth Day fell on April 22, 1970. It led directly to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and major federal legislation including the Clean Air Act. What started as a single day of awareness has stretched across the entire month of April, with schools, local governments, and cultural institutions now using the period to push environmental conversations into public spaces.
Museums have become a reliable part of that calendar.
The Hammer show sits inside a broader moment for Los Angeles institutions trying to connect art-making to ecological thinking, not by hanging a placard about climate on a wall, but by putting the biology of materials at the center of the work. The 22 artists in “Several Eternities in a Day” include several based here in Los Angeles alongside others from across North and South America, and the exhibition asks all of them the same underlying question: what happens when you make something that was never meant to survive?
For Amézquita, the answer connects directly to what California’s own desert landscapes hold, materials that predate human civilization by millions of years and that she’s pulling into gallery spaces where people expect polished permanence. Mojave granite and Pacific ocean water sharing a pedestal in Westwood is, on some level, a very Los Angeles kind of statement.
Argote’s massive figures drive the same point from a different angle. They’re already changing. Every week that the show runs, the avocado in her paint continues its slow chemical process, pulling the color in directions she can’t control and can’t stop. The artwork isn’t finished. It’s alive in the most literal sense, and it will keep going until the paper underneath gives out.
“Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials” runs at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles, through Aug. 23. Admission is free.