Active Cultures

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Active Cultures is a nonprofit cultural organization that explores the convergence of food and art in

06/30/2026

Active Cultures is a public arts nonprofit in Los Angeles that explores the intersection of art, food, and ecologies through artist-led projects and programs. Food is the essential lens through which we examine fundamental questions of power, cultural expression, history, equity, and climate futures, connecting us in ways both intimate and collective.

This September, for the first time, we bring together artists, cooks, farmers, writers, and organizers to engage with the politics of food.

The Convening gathers practitioners who work with food as both material and subject, asking how social practice can make these politics visible, and how cultural and ecological networks can become systems of support when infrastructures fail.

Across two days of performance, presentations, discussion, and shared meals in LA, we examine food as medium, system, archive, and territory.

FOOD: A Convening is open to all. September 25 & 26, 2026. Save the date!

To be the first to receive full program details, sign up for our newsletter at the link in bio.

06/17/2026

This week, Meech Boakye and the AC team joined Tim Martinez of Arroyo Sage Outdoor School for a foraging walk through the Arroyo Seco, learning about and gathering “invasive” plants along the way.

This Saturday, Meech brings that spirit of gathering to Sunstead at the Audubon Center at Debs Park. Come celebrate the longest day of the year with a picnic and collective altar building, fortune telling, and meditative offerings to mark the transition into summer.

We hope to see you there.

June 20, 2026
4:30–7:30 PM
at the Audubon Center at Debs Park

☀️ Link in bio to RSVP! ☀️

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This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

06/09/2026

Sunstead is the latest program in our perennial work with artist Meech Boakye. Over the past four years, Meech has been in conversation with AC in ways that continue to evolve.

Beginning in 2022, we commissioned Meech to create Research Poems, a digital garden that grows and flourishes over seasons. www.researchpoems.com

In 2024, as part of our ECOTONES series presented with The Brick, Meech presented watering, a communal hydration ritual for collective healing, featuring foraged and homemade food and a screening of Jumana Manna’s film, The Foragers.

Meech Boakye is a Canadian-American artist and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice spans foodways, sculpture, publishing and social practice. Through writing, image-making, participatory programs and material experiments, Boakye investigates how care is negotiated through intimate and playful collaborations with matter.

We hope you’ll join us on June 20 for Sunstead, and to celebrate the longest day of the year with us!

☀️ Link in bio for tickets! ☀️

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This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

06/01/2026

AC invites you to ☀️ Sunstead ☀️ an artist-led evening celebrating the longest day of the year.

Conceived by Portland-based artist Meech Boakye, this gathering centers fortune telling and meditative offerings to mark the transition into summer.

June 20, 2026
4:30 PM – 7:30 PM
at the Audubon Center at Debs Park

The picnic will feature non-native ingredients often labeled “invasive,” inviting reflection on the political and cultural histories embedded in how plants, and humans, are categorized.

Meech Boakye’s research examines foraging as a cultural practice increasingly restricted by private property, land access, and ideas of ecological purity—connecting conservation conversations in Portland and Los Angeles to broader questions of migration, adaptation, and belonging, and how so-called invasive ecologies emerge through human histories of trade, displacement, and cultivation.

Sunstead is hosted in partnership with the Audubon Center at Debs Park. The picnic will feature a light meal, performance, participatory actions, as well as artist-designed picnic blankets for seating on the ground.

☀️ Link in bio for tickets! ☀️

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This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

05/05/2026

The third and final film in our Seeds series is Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), selected by artist Clarissa Tossin. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Clarissa on seeds toward the end of their cycle, touching on food waste, and what industrial agriculture considers unfit for display.

Thursday, May 28, 2026
7 PM (Doors 6:30 PM)
at

Please note: seating is limited! Doors open thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Your RSVP does not guarantee you a seat. Seating is first-come, first-served.

🌱 RSVP at the link in bio!

This series is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

04/14/2026

Active Cultures and KCRW present Compost After Writing — a reflective writing program by compost artist and writer Cass Marketos ( )

🪱 LA Times Festival of Books, USC, April 18–19, 2026.
🪱 at KCRW Booth #031 (Cardinal Zone).

Visitors are invited to pause, sit, and respond to a set of reflective writing prompts Cass has created, exploring ideas of transformation, memory, and what we leave behind. You’ll write on seed paper that you can take home to plant or compost.

🪱 On Sunday, April 19 at 2 PM Cass will join us for a short reading and to lead the writing activity. Copies of her book will be available at the booth!

Cass’s new book, Compost After Reading, is a practical manifesto for purposeful decomposition. It’s also compostable.

Come say hi!

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Slide 1: Courtesy of Cass Marketos
Slides 3 and 4: Summer Solstice, 2025, at the Audubon Center at Debs Park. Photos by John Jay (.img )

04/01/2026

Book Club returns this weekend!

Join us on Saturday, April 4 for our fourth session, where we’ll be discussing ‘Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures’ by Anita Mannur.

📚 Sign up via the link in bio to receive full details ahead of each session.

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The Active Cultures Book Club invites our community to engage with texts that delve into the interconnectedness of art, food, and ecologies through collective reading and conversation.

03/11/2026

Join the Active Cultures Book Club for our fourth session, where we’ll be discussing Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures by Anita Mannur.

Saturday, April 4
at The Garden at Bakers Bench
1027 Alpine St., Los Angeles

In Intimate Eating, Mannur examines how cooking and eating shape intimacy, belonging, and political life. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and q***r theory, she introduces the concept of “intimate eating publics,” spaces where marginalized subjects gather through food, blurring the lines between public and private life. Moving across film, literature, television, and performance art, she traces how racialized South Asian and Arab bodies become visible within culinary cultures, and how shared acts of cooking and eating produce new forms of kinship and community. The book rethinks food as a site where race, migration, gender, and social connection are negotiated, and where alternative futures of collective life can emerge.

The Book Club is free and open to all.

Sign up at the link in bio to receive our Book Club communications, which include full location details prior to each session.

03/05/2026

We are hiring for a Getty Marrow Curatorial Intern to support our artistic program in 2026! ⁠Full job description and link to apply in our bio.

The Getty Marrow Curatorial Internship is a ten-week, full time position beginning in June 2026. The intern will assist in the research, planning, and implementation of AC’s programs —across our performances, events, and public art initiatives—while gaining curatorial experience and close work with our team, artists, and cultural partners in Los Angeles and beyond.
⁠
We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Image:
Cocina CoLaboratorio: Migratory Table, February 6, 2026. Presented by Active Cultures and LagoAlgo. Photo by Rubèn Garay.

02/24/2026

Early this month, Cocina CoLaboratorio’s ‘Migratory Table’ gathered participants in Mexico City around a mobile, participatory kitchen moving between Santo Domingo Tomaltepec (Oaxaca), Mexico City, and Los Angeles.

The gathering grew out of conversations with cooks and families in Oaxaca about food that travels: ingredients sent across borders, techniques adapted to new kitchens, and the ways memory and territory persists through taste. In Mexico City, participants shared their own experiences of movement, loss, and adaptation. From these conversations we reflected on the silent networks that sustain and care for the local biodiversity.

Each workshop contributes to a collectively authored cookbook, printed on site and shaped by the geographies, relationships, and foodways present in the room.

Deep gratitude and thanks to Cocina CoLaboratorio, to LagoAlgo for hosting, and to everyone who joined and contributed their knowledge.

Migratory Table will travel to Los Angeles in September 2026.

Slides 1-6: Photos by Rubén Garay ( )
Slides 7-11: Photos by Markus Martínez Burman (.burman )

Address

Los Angeles, CA

Website

http://www.active-cultures.org/

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