Alicia Escott

Alicia Escott is an interdisciplinary artist based in the land currently called San Francisco. She/they practices in solidarity with thinkers across fields undoing the construct of “nature” as a thing separated from us and our world. Escott’s practice is informed by how we each negotiate our day-to-day realities amid an awareness of the overarching specter of climate-chaos, mass-extinction, and the social unrest such rapid change and the subsequent unprocessed grief produces. Her/their work makes space for the unspoken individual and collective experiences of loss, heartbreak and grief, and cultivates spaces of regeneration. She/they approaches these issues with an interstitial practice encompassing writing, drawing, painting, photography, video, sculpture, socialpractice, seed-planting, composting, and activism. Escott has been making work exclusively about environmental and social justice for over 15 years. Her/their recent work directly incorporates habitat restoration into its creation and exhibition and is increasingly interested in creating art spaces for other-thanhuman audiences, as well as their human neighbors. Escott’s work has been shown in over 100 art institutions, galleries, and alternative spaces, including exhibitions at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The San Francisco Maritime Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara. She/they have been an Artist in Residence at Recology, The Growlery, Djerassi Artist Residency, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Irving Street Projects, The JB Blunk Artist Residency and Dream Farm Commons. Escott is a founding member of the collective 100 Days Action and half of the Social Practice Project, The Bureau of Linguistical Reality. Her work has been featured in The Economist, The New Yorker, KQED, MOMUS, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. She/they holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, where she received the Richard K. Prince Scholarship, and a BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in September 2022.

GM: What was your path to becoming an artist?

AE: I always understood myself as an artist. Art felt like a way to process the contradictions and inherent insanity of the world around me. I went to art school for undergrad; while my classes may have been liberal and philosophic in addressing social, political, and especially environmental issues in artmaking was at that time routinely dismissed and usually labeled as “didactic. ” In many ways, I graduated making work that was less pertinent than what I came in making, but I did learn how to think critically, expansively, and creatively. After undergrad, I took some time away from my practice; when I returned to art making, I did so with a firm commitment to myself that from then on, I would make work that directly addressed the issues that were important to me. I felt of paramount importance to the world around us. This has shaped my practice in the nearly two decades since. Because of this, I feel that my career as an artist has followed the rise of social practice. It’s exciting to me that more artists feel compelled to talk about these issues in complex, nuanced, and entangled ways. Sadly, the issues my work addresses have only become more relevant as the years have passed into decades, and more recently this relevancy has increased not linearly, but exponentially.

Alicia Escott, The Archive to Come: Letter to COVID-19 in a Seed (Video Still), 2020/2021. Courtesy of the artist

GM: How do you practice or advocate for creative activism? Why is it important to you?

AE: I have been making work about environmental and social justice issues exclusively for 18 years. Currently, the carbon that was released from car mufflers and smokestacks at the time of my birth is just now having an effect on our “climate. ” We understood then the science of climate change about as well as we do now, but 40 years of science has not created the cultural, embodied, or structural shifts needed to address it. I had to spend a lot of time in my earlier career answering the question if I wanted to “save the planet” , then why was I in the arts? My direct experience with activists, policy makers, and those on the front line is that they deeply want artists in the game.

Alicia Escott, Like Grafting a Live Branch to a Dead Beam II, 2019. Courtesy of the artist

GM: What are your hopes for the upcoming midterm elections?

AE: I hope that we will see free and fair elections be accepted as such. The rise of extremism in this country is extremely scary. Even in a society that was functioning at its highest level – without war, unnecessary conflict, or extreme inequality – the physical challenges facing us as climate chaos accelerates would still feel insurmountable. Sadly, the way that political discourse has broadly devolved, as well as the acceleration of misinformation, makes me worried that we will see the byproducts of a climate crisis that many have feared to be its worst initial consequence: societal breakdown and increased violence. While it’s important that the Democratic party hold onto its slim majority, as it would be my greatest hope that that majority were strengthened so we are not at the whim of 1-2 senators, I hope the most that there is a condemnation of anti-democratic extremism. I hope that as time goes on, those voices become more alienated. It’s very concerning that Democrats prefer to be up against opponents with extreme positions, instead of nuanced, moderate Republicans. It’s a big gamble in an increasingly unstable playing field.

GM: You co-founded the arts collective 100 Days Action. What compelled you to do this, and what has been your experience working with this group?

AE: 100 Days Action coalesced directly after the 2016 Presidential Election. What began as an emergency invitation initiated by artist Jerimiah Barber and writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras, where anyone interested could show up, eventually settled into 12 core members who together formed 100 Days Action. 100 Days Action creates spaces for us and others to initiate acts of both defiance and solidarity. Initially, we were focused on those first 100 Days of the new administration, but kept working beyond that initial time frame. (Continued)

Like many of my social practice collaborations, especially The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, this work has not just been about our artistic expression but creating a space for other’s political and artistic expressions. During the Trump administration’s “First 100 Days” , we hosted some 150 acts of artistic and political expression. One of my favorite projects of ours took place during the 2018 midterm elections, when we created a faux oval office out of cardboard called The People’s Oval Office. This project used spectacle to work in partnership with the organization Mi Familia Vota in order to register voters in a local, flip-able district. The desk invited folks, regardless of age, sex, immigration status, skin color, or sexual orientation, to sit down at The People’s Oval Office and become the president. This platform was a place to generate images of individuals whom the Trump administration increasingly alienated holding this office. As President, participants were invited to draft an Executive Order on the spot. Our administration was thus successful in: ending rape culture, allocating reparations, LANDBACK, universal housing and healthcare, rights to nature, an end to car culture, and many other formerly “impossible” achievements. The documents that came out of The People’s Oval Office were a growing testimony of the hopes, dreams, and demands of the individuals and communities we worked with. Early on in our process together, we as a group realized that just coming together in that difficult time, holding conversation together, and making work together was already a success, regardless of the outcome of that work. In this way, 100 Days Action changed my life and how I think about art making and success. This recently came up on a panel, when curator Thea Quiray Tagle talked about how we, and the work of other collectives, were actually practicing skills for the collective decision making that we will increasingly need in order to create a habitable future. This sentiment really resonated with me.

Left to Right: Installation views of The People ' s Oval Office, 2018 in Modesto, CA and CCA Hubbell Street Galleries. Photos taken by Ben Leon and Courtesy of 100 Days Action

GM: What are you currently working on in your practice?

AE: I’m working seasonally. At this stage in my practice, I have learned to juggle collaborative and collective work with a solo practice, and also balance work inside and outside of the studio in the form of habitat regeneration and community building. This past summer, I had a show that included a video installation alongside my Metabolic Rifts and Domestic Interiors sculptures that felt very meaningful. These are living sculptures made in collaboration with local wildflower seeds. I’m increasingly interested in these works as sculptures for nonhuman audiences, as they are the host plants for several pollinators. The video works were an extension of this work and feature both my hand and the hand of an assistant, artist Sommer Taylor, as caretakers for them. The paired down minimal videos show our hands reaching out and caressing the plants; reversely, the plants themselves reach out to our hands. This work spoke to interspecies longing, connectivity, and reciprocity in the way that the living sculptures and our hands engage one another. This work will likely resume again during the rainy season, when it’s time to scatter seeds. This fall, I am in residence at Dream Farm Commons in Oakland, continuing my work with oak ecologies, and more broadly, ecologies that have historically co-evolved with fire through the work of the Chochenyo and Ramaytush Ohlone people. This residency is intentionally unfolding during the fall, our “fire season” and the time when acorns can be planted. We are hoping oak saplings can be transported at the end of the residency to empty, treeless holes in the pavement on the surrounding streets of downtown Oakland, where Dream Farm Commons is located. This planting will hopefully be undertaken with the help of students at a next-door high school. This work is unfolding, but it practically and metaphorically uses the community building nature of oak trees as a model. Oak trees link their roots underground to hold each other up via mutual aid, and the generosity of their acorns help support an entire complex “ecosystem” – or as I like to think, community. Much of my work grapples with the separation of ourselves from “nature” – something that is so deeply problematic. Everything is nature, but then it isn’t. Plastic is a product of nature, but it’s been molecularly altered and is thus incompatible with so much of what we term the “natural” world. I’ve come to understand “nature” here as a series of co-evolved relationships, what you might call ecosystems, or more simply, communities.