As the inaugural Artists-in-Residence at Yale-NUS college in Singapore, Christa Donner and Andrew S. Yang researched gardens as a critical interface between city-dwelling humans and fellow organisms. Singapore is called “the City in a Garden” for good reason: plants grow quickly in the tropical climate, and lush landscaping is cultivated on every available surface, including rooftops and highway underpasses, alongside abundant community garden plots, vertical farms, futuristic “supertrees,” secret guerrilla gardens, and more.

The residency period coincided with the unfolding of the COVID-19 Pandemic, which meant adapting to rapidly changing circumstances. As studio, exhibition, and travel plans were canceled, the artists refocused research toward daily walks, portable objects, and domestic space.

In Listening Through the Landscape, Donner and Yang present short, guided audio walks that explore the nature of time and the ecology of Singapore through trees, soil, and water. Combining narration by Alexis Chen with environmental sounds collected during the 2020 “Circuit Breaker” period, this work transforms everyday spaces into multisensory journeys. The walks are meant to be experienced with headphones, using the participant’s smartphone, and so are accessible anywhere and anytime. A transcript of the scores can be downloaded here. Listening through the Landscape was commissioned by the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, with support from the Yale-NUS Dean of Faculty.

Other projects developed during this period include:
* a set of responsive artist-made books (each artist responding to visual prompts within a handmade book made by the other)
* collaged paper gardens developed from imagery collected before lockdown
* a multimedia installation using sound, organic matter, drawings, and video collected or generated during the residency period.
* a series of “hostcards,” postcards featuring images of invited and/or invasive species from many parts of the world that are thriving in Singapore.

Learn more about this residency experience through the Archepelagic AIR Podcast.

Studies for Simultaneous Listening blends the local soundscape with field recordings, video, and hand-drawn maps.

Part I inserts video and sound into the spaces surrounding Roman Susan Gallery in Chicago. Activated at dusk each evening, these projected field recordings mix unpredictably with the pre-existing noises of wildlife, weather, and traffic, allowing us to sit with the ecological past / present / possible future of the area simultaneously.

For Part II, these recordings set the tone for an intimate audio walking tour called “Dear Human,” created for the West Ridge Nature Preserve. Participants are invited to travel to points on an artist-designed map of the park, using their own headphones and smartphones to activate site-specific messages from non-human residents (a tick, a tree, a pond). This work uses headphones to bring voices and directional noises into the existing sounds present along the walk. The map and audio transcription are available both as a limited-edition risograph print, and as a downloadable PDF.

This project is part of Roman Susan’s Navigations series and is presented in conjunction with the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennale: The Available City. 


Imagining possible future forms of community, this body of work draws on feminist legacies, ecological and biological study, and speculative fiction to propose models of community that move beyond current human-centered and capitalist systems. Drawings shown here interconnect with large scale works on paper, multimedia installation , and immersive audio to investigate sites and structures of the non-human world - from geological strata to female-led insect colonies - to raise questions about how we engage caregiving, conflict, and cooperation in a changing world. 

For more information download the exhibition brochure or read Lori Waxman's review of the show in the Chicago Tribune.

An architectural space is cast on the wall from a cutout, shadow puppet of a structure. Slides of of constructions dedicated to creative collectives and utopian plans that engage care work are projected into a window of the shadow building. A table stacked with research materials referencing science fiction, adventure playgrounds, activist projects, and the female-run social structures of wasps, ants, and bees suggest sources that might direct us toward alternate ways to imagine communities of the future.

Overhead, you’ll hear me reading from artist Palle Nielsen’s 1968  “Model for a Qualitative Society,” a treatise that accompanied his gigantic adventure playground installation at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in which children were invited to climb, jump, build, decorate and destroy the space without adult intervention. Nielsen’s text serves here as a bridge between the imaginative spaces explored through my material practice and my lived experiences and activism as an artist-mother.

These Future Foremothers depict women proposed as founding ancestors for a future society. These mythological figures are based on influential artists, writers, friends, environmental activists, and the artist’s young daughter.  Their collective labor draws together smaller works on paper between them that explore relationships between care and conflict, natural and human-made environments.

The CoAdaptation Field Station is a hybrid wall drawing and research site that sits between lived realities and imagined futures. Visitors are encouraged to explore a range of intersecting materials that link collective activism, adventure play, interspecies care, and speculative fiction as tools to build resilience and community in a rapidly changing world.

The art world doesn’t really know what to do with cultural producers who are actively engaged in caregiving. Many artists find themselves isolated from the art community once they have children, a condition that continues to have a profound impact on the artistic, curatorial, and critical perspectives included in the discourse of contemporary art.

Cultural ReProducers is an ongoing creative platform initiated in 2012 in collaboration with an evolving group of artists, critics, and curators raising young children. As a community, Cultural ReProducers explore the intersection of artmaking and family life through a diverse range of projects that include an online resource, a childcare-supported art event series and generative workshops, a multimedia exhibition, and a risographed zine of experiments in artist-parenthood. These activities propose new models for institutional support while building networks of exchange, visibility, and dialogue to realize our collective needs and desires.

Merging the formats of an audio tour and a guided visualization session, this multisensory installation opens a conversation with the living architecture of our own bodies. Participants are invited to experience sensory travel untethered from medical imagery (listen to trailer here).  Upon entering the space you will be seated comfortably and led through a relaxing process in which a small mint serves as an entry point, following its passage into the mouth, down the throat, and into a reimagined anatomy.

Each participant will discover a part of the body in need of particular attention or care, and within it a strong emotion housed there. With eyes closed, they shape the soft material warming in their hands into a vessel that will help them to process that emotion and perhaps transform it into something else entirely.

Tours are limited to four people at a time, available twice a day by appointment. Upon completing the tour, you will be invited to a private gallery open only to participants, where you can view others' responses and contribute to our archive.

By its nature, the archive is carefully and systematically organized, bringing a sense of structure and order to the chaos of the natural world. As vast amounts of specialized data are collected and stored there, this collected knowledge also attains a growing measure of unknowableness: any serious researcher can become familiar only with a small fraction of its contents, and for non-specialists outside the Institute there is very little access to its contents at all. This situation opens up new opportunities for curiosity and wonder within the ordered systems of the collection.

The ReDistribution of Curiosity began through a series of conversations with scholars at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science working in diverse areas of research, from medieval medicines to early computer graphics. The act of drawing has the capacity to abstract and ambiguate any sense of time, space, scale and origin these images might initially have, allowing for creative recategorization, unexpected visual connections and the emergence of new narratives. Working with the Institute's library and digitized rare book collection, I created a personal archive of notes and images using inks, pigments, cut paper, and shadows.

In ordering the resulting images by my own systems of categorization, as did collectors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I seek to to share these reconfigured collections with others. This is where the ReDistribution of Curiosity comes in: a selection of the completed drawings have been multiplied as postcards to be disseminated both within and beyond the institution, activating our collective curiosity through the participation of the MPI community. The project was also expanded through a Collective Curiosity workshop and public exhibition at Berlin's Aviatrix Atelier, an intergenerational studio space and gallery organized by and for creative parents and their families, as well as the local community.

The relationships between humankind and the planet we occupy are complex, beautiful, and often troubling. ‘Conversations About the Future’ considers the impact of past and present generations on the world inherited by the next. Beginning and end points to this narrative are indeterminate. Jawbones, mountain ranges, and insect nests look to be eerily similar playthings. The strategies of other organisms offer models to consider if our own systems fail. This dialogue can change as pieces are rearranged.

Because our eyes can adjust their depth of focus and exposure to see both the blue of the sky and the white of the paper in the window together, the conversation extends to include the geology, biology, and human activity beyond the glass, outside and in. Like it or not, you are part of this story too.

In 1859 the port of Yokohama was the first site in Japan to open its ports to foreign ships. The trade that followed exposed both Japan and the United States to new materials, technologies, and cultural influences, creating hybrid forms.  150 years later I traveled to the region for a residency at BankArt NYK, where I was Inspired by the narrative qualities of Yokohama-e prints, which fused imagery and techniques of East and West to record this first intense period of cultural exchange. My research there began with a series of visual translations of everyday objects, architecture, and forms from nature that stood out to me as a newcomer. I also a kept blog, “ihoojin no me kara“ (which roughly translates to “from the eyes of a visitor”) where I recorded this process of learning from and responding to the local culture.

I was particularly struck by the Ooka river, which flowed below the window of my apartment, running onward through intensely urban areas and supporting an astonishing array of fish, stingrays, and jellyfish in its mix of fresh and salt water. One of my initial drawings based on the river reminded me of ink drawings I’d seen depicting the extremely long hair popular during the Heian period. While written using different characters, in spoken Japanese the word “kami” is a homonym that can mean “hair,” “paper,” or a kind of Shinto spirit-god linked with natural forces.  This multiple translation resonated with me, and I developed a drawing-based installation representing a waterfall or river of hair connecting the human spaces of the city to the river outside. As it moves through the interior and exterior spaces of the building, this “Kami” invokes the larger-than-life spirit of the river goddess Benzaiten, and suggests a supernatural presence linking ancient tales of Heian-period royalty to contemporary urban Japan.

This project was supported through the generous support of the Asian Cultural Council and a residency at Bankart NYK in Yokohama, Japan.

Re:Production is comprised of an interview-based zine, a series of works on paper, a wall drawing, and a video created with artist and biologist Andrew Yang. This work examines the interrelationships between fertility and identity, imagining new visions of human reproduction during a time when fertility drugs and genetic modification seem to make all sorts of impossible things viable. Its imagery is drawn from the anatomy of other organisms and from the diverse experiences of women interviewed for the project.

Photographic documentation from a series of site-specific drawings exploring ritual, the supernatural, and the revision of man-made structures by other organisms. Created for the landscape and interior spaces of an aging farmhouse in rural Massachusetts.

Here are a few early experiments in reimagining the human body based on physical sensation.  As a young person I learned to cope creatively with severe chronic pain, a process that later led me out of the studio to exchange experiences with others, transforming the invisible into something powerful, playful, and radical. This approach profoundly changed my relationship to the human body and to larger systems of support. Using paper to explore the fragile but flexible nature of these interconnected networks makes a lot of sense to me, whether it’s through the layered illogic of collage, the intimacy of hand-held zines, or the immersive qualities of large-scale drawing and installation. The trajectory of my work continues to evolve through projects and publications produced in collaboration with rural teenagers, scientists and historians,  and an international community of artists raising children.