Self Help Graphics & Art 2024 Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide Exhibition

Sinks: Places We Call Home

In Los Angeles, as elsewhere in the United States, communities of color are often the populations most vulnerable to the toxic effects of industrial waste and soil contamination. Sinks: Places We Call Home highlights the environmental disparities created by manufacturing sites in two communities located near Self Help Graphics & Art (SHG): Exide Battery plant in Vernon and the former Athens Tank Farm (Exxon/Mobil Oil Corporation) in Willowbrook. Los Angeles-based artists Beatriz Jaramillo and Maru Garcia are conducting data-driven research that reveals harmful practices of the past and present and their long-term devastating ramifications on communities of color and the environment. Producing new work for the exhibition, Garcia partnered with the Natural History Museum’s Mineral Department to pursue soil testing and lead reduction studies with Community Scientists in the areas surrounding Vernon. Jaramillo will uplift voices, stories, and data from the Willowbrook community to elevate how white supremacy has shaped urban planning policies and its long-term impact on the people and environment. Sinks does not attempt to change the past but to elevate the voices and stories of the people who form these neighborhoods, despite the locations having served as sinks or reservoirs of pollution, and informs audiences about land contamination and alternative solutions. 

In Sinks: Places We Call Home, Jaramillo and Garcia interrogate a history of government negligence, elevate stories, and explore tangible solutions that communities living in contaminated neighborhoods can access. Their artwork and practice aim to shift our relationship with the land and empower us to connect with the soil through knowledge, stewardship, and advocacy. 

The exhibition also features work by Kim Abeles, Miyo Stevens-Gandara, Poli Marichal, Tara Pixley, Albert Tlatoa, Christian Salcedo Ward, Joan Zamora, and poetry by Tina Calderon. 

Beatriz Jaramillo

Maru Garcia 

The artist Maru Garcia founded Prospering backyards (Pb) in collaboration with Self Help Graphics and Art and the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum as a part of her examination of the catastrophic lead contamination by the Exide Battery Plant in SouthEast Los Angeles and surrounding neighborhoods, one of the most costly environmental cleanups in history.  Recognizing the failures of the government to remediate the contamination to date, Garcia partnered with the Museum’s Mineral Science Department to pursue soil testing and lead reduction studies using the mineral Zeolite, which captures and encapsulates lead, thus reducing lead levels in the soil. The Community Science department at NHM worked with Pb and the community scientists to install test sites at their homes to conduct a year-long research project demonstrating zeolites as an alternative lead reduction and a critical tool to mitigate the risk of living within the Exide-affected area.  

Artist Biography

Maru Garcia’s methodology combines laboratory and fieldwork tools from her background in plant chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry. Her media use includes research, installations, performance, sculpture, and video, usually including organic matter to help understand the biological processes occurring in complex systems. Her areas of interest are biosystems, multispecies relations, and the capacity of living organisms (including humans) to act as remediators in contaminated sites. Her work highlights the importance of eco-aesthetics, in which relations are proposed as ways of building cultures of regeneration. At the same time, she questions the ways science and technology have influenced humans more than humans within the natural world.

Maru has participated in conferences and solo and group exhibitions in North America, Europe, and Asia. She was an artist in residence at the National Center of Genetic Resources in Mexico and has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts ‘Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Art Grant,’ the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) Environmental Justice Grant, the California Arts Council, Los Angeles Sustainability Collaborative, Clifton Webb Scholarship for the Arts, and Fundación Jumex. She collaborated with the Art-Sci Center and Counterforce Lab at UCLA and was a 2020- 2021 Sci-Art Ambassador for Supercollider. She worked at the Getty Research Institute in the 2019-2020 Scholar program titled “Art and Ecology” and was a 2021-2022 artist in residence at 18th Street Arts Center. Maru holds an MFA in Design & Media Arts from UCLA, an MS in Biotechnology, and a BS in Chemistry from Tecnológico de Monterrey, México.

This exhibition was organized by Self Help Graphics and Art, Inc., in partnership with the Natural History Museum Los Angeles County and The Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State L.A. with the support of the Getty Foundation through its Art & Science Collide Initiative. The exhibition was curated by Marvella Muro with Ana Guajardo, Curatorial Assistant.

Self Help Graphics & Art Curatorial Team

Marvella Muro, Curator
Ana Guajardo, Curatorial Assistant
Lulu Urdiales, Associate Registrar, Loans and Exhibitions

Willowbrook Partners

Rose and Roneika Pickney at the Willowbrook Community Garden
Willowbrook Inclusion Network

Prospering Backyards Core Team

Maru Garcia, Project Lead, Prospering Backyards 
Aaron Celestian, Senior Curator, Mineral Science Department, Natural History Museum
Lila Higgins, Senior Manager, Community Science Department, Natural History Museum
Sam Tayag, Program Manager, Community Science Department, Natural History Museum
Miguel Ordeñana, Senior Manager, Community Science Department, Natural History Museum
Jordan Salcedo, Communications and Community Building

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