Several Los Angeles museums are treating April as more than a calendar marker, with exhibitions built around organic and living materials that force a real question: what happens to art when it’s designed to change, decay, and eventually disappear?
The anchor of it all is at the Hammer Museum in Westwood. The show is titled “Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials” and it doesn’t apologize for its ambitions. Twenty-two artists from across the Americas contributed work, filling the galleries with sculptures, paintings, and collages made from avocado, cacao, flowers, stone, clay, sand, and natural dyes. The run extends through Aug. 23. The whole premise inverts the usual expectation that good art survives. Here, decay isn’t a flaw. It’s the point.
L.A.-based Mexican American artist Carmen Argote made two figures that stand 16 feet tall. Human-like. Impossible to walk past. She didn’t use brushes. Hands and feet, dipped in avocado, cochineal dye, and lemon juice, applied directly to the paper. The two works are titled “an archetype of stillness” and “an archetype of touch.” As the avocado dries over the course of the show, it releases oil and begins to break down the paper underneath. What visitors see on opening day won’t be what they see in August.
Argote spoke to LAist about what the process cost her. “This piece has taught me so much about letting go,” she said. “And really accepting the life of a material and life of an artwork.” That’s not a comfortable place for any artist to land, and she doesn’t pretend it is.
Also in the exhibition is Jackie Amézquita, another L.A.-based artist, whose work arrives under the title “Cuerpos terrestres en fluidez” — translated as “Terrestrial Bodies in Fluidity.” Amézquita worked in rammed earth, a construction technique traced back to the Neolithic period. She pulled decomposed granite from the Mojave Desert, then combined it with lava rocks, obsidian, rain, and ocean water to build a set of sculptures. Then she broke them apart. The fragmentation isn’t incidental. It’s the whole argument.
Amézquita’s point is worth quoting directly. “There’s this idea that we have of nature to not be permanent when it’s actually older than us,” she said. She’s right, and the work makes you feel it. California’s own desert landscapes cover hundreds of miles of terrain that existed long before any human institution thought to preserve them. Her use of Mojave granite ties that geological timeline directly into the gallery space.
She pressed the idea further. “That is part of our human condition,” Amézquita said. “We’re always confronted with the idea of life and death.” The sculptures don’t let you forget it.
Earth Month carries its own historical weight here. The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970. That single event pushed the federal government into action, producing the Environmental Protection Agency and anchoring major legislation including the Clean Air Act. What was designed as a one-day demonstration has since expanded across the full month, with schools, local governments, and cultural institutions treating April as a sustained push rather than a single occasion.
Los Angeles museums have become a reliable stop on that calendar. The Hammer show lands inside a city that’s actively wrestling with its environmental identity, a place where wildfire smoke, Pacific drought cycles, and urban heat islands aren’t abstract policy concerns but recurring facts of daily life.
The Hammer isn’t the only venue in the mix. Several Los Angeles institutions have built Earth Month programming around similar questions about materials, time, and what it means to make something that won’t last.
But it’s the Westwood show that’s pulling the most weight. Twenty-two artists, work that spans the Americas, and a run through Aug. 23 — the math alone signals institutional commitment. The deeper signal is what the exhibition asks of its visitors: not just to look at art made from living things, but to accept that those things won’t stay the same, and to sit with what that means.
Argote put it plainly. The avocado will keep breaking down the paper. That process was always the work.