Metabolic Studio

08/30/2026

Come to the Milpa this Sunday august 30, and make Guardians of the Well from wild clay!

This clay was dug from the earth beneath the Milpa—land that was once part of the Los Angeles River’s floodplain, before the river was channelized.

Our colleagues at Anahuacalmecac have taught us that, traditionally, children are understood as guardians of the world. Inspired by this teaching, we invite children and adults to sculpt guardian figures from the clay. Alex Tanasi and our team will transform them into lids for the ollas that hold Los Angeles River water and slowly release it into the soil, nourishing the plants growing in the Milpa.

Come make a guardian, tend the water, and join us in caring for this living place. Sunday at the Milpa!

08/27/2026

posting this today on the first birthday of Kathy Bancroft since she died several months ago,

08/23/2026

join us tomorrow, sunday august 23, 12-7 pm

08/19/2026

“Teachings That Took Root: Indigenous Knowledge Guiding the Healing of Land and Water” by Milli Macen Moore Milli Macen-Moore brings together images of Indigenous knowledge keepers whose teachings have influenced Metabolic Studio’s Farmlab since 2005. It honors their enduring presence in guiding the ongoing care and healing of land, water, and seed in Los Angeles.

Join Milli tomorrow, Thursday 8/20, at the LA River Farmers Market to talk about her zine. She’ll share about the teachings she honors, Metabolic Studio’s Farmlab practices, and the zines growing out of our work with the river, water, plants, and soil. See you there!

08/15/2026

Betty Lyons is a citizen of the Onondaga Nation and a member of its Snipe Clan. The Onondaga are one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

She is also president and executive director of the American Indian Law Alliance and serves on the Haudenosaunee External Relations Committee. We are so honored to have hosted her and her community thanks to Academia Anawakalmekak who were giving their esteemed visitors a tour of LA. thank you Adam Hersko-RonaTas for capturing the moment with this video!

08/13/2026

Deep underneath the floodplain, more than fifty feet down, we discovered clay at Metabolic Studio. This used to be a seabed, and over millennia, the soil and rocks compacted into clay—ceramic artist Alex Tanasi works with those unearthed raw. His zine, “Touching the Past: Clay as a Medium of Connection,” explores clay as a powerful material that connects ancestral knowledge, communal practice, and human creativity through the act of shaping the earth. It highlights clay’s role as both a life-sustaining natural resource and a teacher of patience, care, and our deep relationship to the land.

Today, August 13, Alex Tanasi will be at the LA River Farmers’ Market, sharing about his zine, Metabolic Studio’s Farmlab practices and working with wild clay. See you there!

08/07/2026

08/05/2026

Maru Garcia Maru García is an artist/chemist working across art + science + environment, often through collaborative and community-led research methodologies. In “Protocols of Repair”, she documents soil remediation experiments as part of “Un-Development 2”, a warehouse transforming into a new bed for the Los Angeles River.

“Unseen Un-Development: How Big is Here?” by biologist and organizer Diego Zapata mediates on ecological repair in “Un-Development 1”, a former tow yard and living systems experiment across scales, from microscopic life in our soil, to the expansive watershed systems that surround us and defines our landscape.

Tomorrow, August 6 at the LA River Farmers’ Market, Maru and Diego will talk about their experiments, and how to work with the land you have. Want to know more about the ground beneath your feet? We will test your soil! Bring up to three samples from your backyard, a nearby park or a plot you’re curious about and we’ll test the soil for heavy metals and other contaminants. See you there!

07/30/2026

What happens when artists and bioremediators open the concrete floor of a former industrial warehouse, transplant the healthy ecosystem of the Topanga Hills into a carved opening named Kora, and let the local ecological systems interact with it? Witness insects, arthropods, fungi, reptiles, worms, and moths and such, moving in and calling Kora home.

Find out in “All the Pretty Little Bugs” by artist Michel Bréard, presented along with his zine “Speed Dating with Flowers on a Cloudy Day”, new zines from Metabolic Studio’s Farmlab. Today at the LA River’s Farmers Market,Metabolic Studio’s Farmlab shares the practices, observations—and zines—growing out of our work with the river, water, plants, and soil. See you there!

07/28/2026

Today marks one year since my mother’s passing.

For twenty-five years, Wallis Annenberg led the Annenberg Foundation with remarkable generosity, imagination, and conviction. She believed philanthropy could do more than respond to need—it could help shape the civic, ecological, and cultural life of a city.

I will always be grateful that she trusted me to pursue a different kind of philanthropy. Through Metabolic Studio, she made space for work that often seemed improbable: treating infrastructure as a cultural medium, asking artists to participate in ecological reparation, and believing that long-term care for rivers, soils, and public landscapes was worthy of patient investment.

That trust changed my life.

Growing up as Wallis’s daughter meant witnessing a woman whose ambition was often underestimated because it was expressed through generosity rather than power. She was fiercely curious, deeply engaged, and increasingly willing to place bold bets on ideas that others couldn’t yet see. In that, she gave me permission to become an artist who works at the scale of systems rather than objects.

Some of the work we shared was, in its own way, feminist—not because it announced itself as such, but because it insisted that care is not secondary to power. That repairing landscapes, supporting communities, building public infrastructure, and investing over generations are forms of leadership worthy of equal respect.

One of my favorite memories is standing beside her as construction began on the Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. I remember how excited she was. She understood that this was more than a bridge for wildlife. It was an act of repair—an acknowledgment that we have responsibilities to the living world we have fragmented. I was so proud to watch her embrace that vision with such joy.

I miss my mother. I miss our conversations, her laughter, her instincts, and her faith that improbable ideas could become real.

Thank you, Mom—for your leadership, for your courage, and for believing in work that sought not simply to build, but to repair.