Material Acts: Material Experimentation in Architecture and Design examines the role of nature as a starting point for material experimentation in the domains of architecture, craft, and science. While nature has often stood in as a model, metaphor, or resource for designers, the recent global upheavals in climate, ecology, and technology are driving intensified understandings of nature’s tangible and imagined substrate. The exhibition will examine how contemporary design practices mobilize, confound, and generate natures, whether through simulating mechanics or growing biological matter.

The exhibition is organized around five “material acts,” Re-Fusing, Stitching, Animating, Disassembling, and Feeding. Each of these terms operate as thematic clusters illustrating key events in a material’s production, from the fusion of sedimentary grain such as sand with plastics, to the intentional dismantling of a stone column by the pulling of a single piece of string. If we frame “materials” as a verb rather than a fixed object, as “authored” objects rather than discovered conditions, we are better able to explore the fullness of matter undergoing transformation as it sheds one state of arrangement in order to adopt another.

The exhibition highlights new material practices alongside the rich milieu of ideas that accompany their making, including revisiting the term “nature,” “innovation,” and “sustainability.” The wastefulness of single-use materials, from plastics to minerals, have prompted designers to embrace alternative design principles, such as “degrowth,” emphasizing shrinking rather than growing economies, in order to use less material resources, and “disassembly,” the practice of designing buildings to facilitate future change through dismantlement, in order to allow for a recovery or recycling of materials. Terms such as such as biodesign, biomimicry, and biorealism are revisited through the perspectives of life cycles, degrowth and post-naturalism, perspectives that together show nature to be inheritably and intentionally altered by humans.

Founded as a museum in 1973, Craft Contemporary reveals the potential of craft to educate, captivate, provoke, and empower. With a focus on contemporary art made from craft media and processes, Craft Contemporary presents dynamic exhibitions by established and emerging artists and designers who are often under-represented in larger art institutions. Craft Contemporary complements these exhibitions with a creative lineup of educational programs, including hands-on workshops led by professional artists. Craft Contemporary cultivates an environment for people in Los Angeles to deepen their relationship to art, creativity, and one another.

Focused on the intersection of science and art, PST ART 2024 will be the third regional collaboration in the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time series. This iteration will present an ambitious range of exhibitions and public programs that explores the connections between the visual arts and science, from prehistoric times to the present and across different cultures worldwide.