American Artist on Seeing Climate Crisis’s Patterns as LA Fires Rage

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, an ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.

Earlier this month, as wildfires swept through Los Angeles, American Artist was busy installing their latest exhibition 2,500 miles away, at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Their show, “Shaper of God,” examines the life and work of science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who most famously wrote Parable of the Sower, a seminal 1993 novel set in a Southern California ravaged by climate catastrophe, fires, and social inequality.

Artist discovered Butler’s work in college and grew fascinated by some shared connections between themself and her. Both attended John Muir High School in Pasadena, and Artist grew up nearby in the historically Black neighborhood of Altadena, where Butler lived until 1999. In sculptures, installations, and several video works, Artist explores the world in which Butler was writing, in order to understand her writing as grounded in her lived reality, rather than merely imaginative what-ifs or uncanny prophecies. That is to say, he work was grounded in Southern California in 1980s and ’90s.

By the time the show opened on Friday, the Eaton Fire, which is now 95 percent contained, had burned over 14,000 acres and destroyed over 9,000 structures in Altadena, Pasadena, and other areas nearby. As Artist told ARTnews, “Shaper of God” is, in many ways, a “celebration” of the area, making the installation a surreal experience. “Before no one ever knew [about Altadena]. It feels like, in a way, I’m debuting that place, but people are coming into it with the context that it has burned down,” Artist said.

ARTnews spoke with Artist over Zoom to discuss how they collapse space and time between themself and Butler, what we gain by understanding the author’s context, and how we might heed Butler’s warnings.

This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: This show is opening as the fires in and around Los Angeles continue to rage. Large swathes of your hometown have burned, including your former home. How has that impacted you as you’ve worked on and installed this show, which is so directly connected to climate catastrophe?

American Artist: It’s wild, because a lot of the places that I’m talking about are in the area that’s been burning. I don’t know what has happened with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory [a longstanding NASA research facility] because they are in the hills near Altadena. The Arroyo Seco is up there and that’s a subject of one of the videos. It just feels weird. Because I grew up there, I take for granted that of course it’s going to be there. But all my friends’ family homes have burned down. All the places where my formative memories happened are gone. The schools I went to, the home I grew up in, it’s all gone. It feels like erasing a formative part of my life.

I haven’t been back since the fires started. I’m sure seeing it in person would change how I process what’s happened. But it feels like I am in some form of grief for that place, even though I don’t have a physical connection there now. It’s bittersweet because the show is really a celebration of that place. Maybe it will add more depth to people’s experience of the work, because now a lot of people know about Altadena. Before no one ever knew [about Altadena]. It feels like, in a way, I’m debuting that place, but people are coming into it with the context that it has burned down.

It’s interesting that you describe the show as a celebration. A lot of work about climate change and climate catastrophe bears this overwhelming grief. While I don’t think that is totally absent in the show, this body of work seems much more focused on possibility.

I was trying to show through these different generations of, say, Butler’s family, and what happens in the novels, how things naturally progress, or how survival happens. I look at Butler’s grandmother’s chicken ranch [which is the basis for Estella Butler’s Apple Valley Autonomy, a sculpture of a chicken coop filled with recreations of Butler’s archival papers], and how that ultimately laid the foundation for Butler to be the writer that she was. I’ve been thinking of these moments where people create opportunities for survival, because most of the Black people who moved to California from the South were trying to escape racial violence, like lynchings, and also trying to find work opportunities. They were going to New York and Chicago, but also Los Angeles. Butler’s family’s migration was a survival tactic. That impulse is reflected in the Earthseeders conducting their rocket test [in The Monophobic Response, a two-channel video work where Artist filmed artists, rocket engineers, and scholars testing a rocket engine designed by students of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Lab in 1936]. They’re thinking, “Okay, everything has gone to shit. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to make a way for ourselves?”

Across the show, it seems that there are multiple gestures of collapsing. I’m thinking here not of climate collapse, but how you collapse the space between yourself and Butler in Octavia E. Butler Papers: mssOEB 1-9062: Local Documents, 2025, where you literally retrace her life page by page, or between past and present in Estella Butler’s Apple Valley Autonomy, which combines Butler’s grandmother’s chicken coop with the author’s archive. There’s also the space between fantasy and reality, as in To Acorn, which blends the LA bus stops Butler used with references to her imagined community from Parable of the Sower. Is the collapsing of these binaries intentional?

It was definitely a conscious choice. I often think about trying to put A and B together to show a third thing. I do a lot of that through time—collapsing a past moment and a future moment. Oftentimes in my work, I’m doing that to show what the patterns of history are, and how things operate in alignment with Butler’s process. I’m trying to show how this is the way things will be if nothing changes. But I also wanted to show how much of her work is directly a reflection of her lived experience and environment. Most people reading her books don’t live in Altadena. They don’t have the same context. And so, it was important to me to show, in depth, the process of an author whose work embodies all of their life. We take for granted how that happens.

In the monograph accompanying the show, you say that in studying Octavia Butler’s process, she taught you to use history to “accurately describe the challenges we will face in the future” and that you wanted to move past just telling what-if stories. What do you think we miss when we position Butler within the more traditional science-fiction context?

In the history of science fiction, and in the history modern art as well, you often have these mythical narratives of artists. A lot of them are white men who you don’t really know much about. You don’t know how they grew up. They exist almost in a vacuum. There is a shift happening where [people] are trying to give context, good or bad, about these major artists, whether it’s revealing a problematic context or showing the steps to an artist’s process. Similarly for me, I felt like Butler as a person is a whole other deep story [beyond her novels]. I wanted to show that and hold it together.

It’s important to understand that no one lives or works in a vacuum. We are often told that things happen in a vacuum, that we can’t see patterns of how things unfold or why people do the things they do. That’s just not true. We benefit from understanding the context of people and how they operate in the same way that we benefit from understanding history in general. It goes back to the trope of trying to separate the art from the artist. And, well, the artist wouldn’t make the work they’re making if it weren’t for who they are.

Butler described herself as a news junkie. She would do very heavy research. She would read and listen to the news every day. She kept meticulous notes and documents about different phenomena—science, medical, historical, all kinds of things—and I wanted to show some of that depth in the show … That was her magic, she just paid attention to everything and she was able to speculate on all these things. I wanted that to be present. I also think a lot of people don’t know much about Butler beyond her being a Black woman that wrote science fiction. They have, I imagine, a very rosy picture of what her stories must be like. But they’re actually incredibly violent and destructive, and meant as a warning about what could happen. So I wanted people to listen to that and not just take pleasure in how what she wrote is now aligning with reality, but actually thinking: How can we prevent this from cycling continuously?

Arroyo Seco, which was made in 2022, talks about fires as part of the natural ecology of the area. At one point, the narrator talks about the contested decision to remove certain plant material necessary for controlling fires from the ecosystem. Given the show’s focus on Southern California fires and the ecology, do you see the work as evidence of your success in adapting Butler’s process?

I was thinking about this, because I think a lot of people read Butler and they see the things she’s describing happening, and they’re almost excited. But, with these fires, I felt disappointment, like, “Oh, we didn’t listen to anything she said.” It feels really frustrating because we literally had the information. Fires have always been a part of that area. That’s nothing new, but they’ve definitely never gone into the city to this extreme, I just anticipate that it’s going to happen again and worse, just based on what’s happening. People need to recognize that and think about how to respond.

There are multiple references to community—in the gesture of a reading room that frames three of the video works, and in the Earthseeders that enact the rocket test in The Monophobic Response. Do you see creative production as a communal act?

Over the last couple years, I have been gradually trying to bring my friends more into my process. I still operate somewhat traditionally, in that I’m the primary person deciding what it is that I want to do. But I have a good friend who is a designer who worked with me on [the monograph], and I was really excited to be able to ask her to do that. All the video works were produced by another friend of mine who’s very well-versed in film. It’s really nice to be able to have a connection that’s not just professional or practical, but it’s also, like, “Oh, we’re friends and I appreciate your perspective and what you bring to the project.” And that’s something I’m trying to do more of. In the art world, we’re constantly pushed toward a very individualistic, capitalistic mindset and process. I’ve been trying to spend time with other artists that are at a similar point in their career lately and it is so difficult because they’re all so busy, and they’re all in their own little bubble. And so, I’ve just wanted to find antidotes to the way that we’re all pushed to produce.

In each of the three films that play back to back—Arroyo Seco, Christopher Donner, and Alicia Catalina Godinez Leal—the characters reference “space programs taking all the money” and a space program as something we “can no longer afford.” It reminded me of Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word poem “Whitey on the Moon.”

That’s the thing, it’s not a new idea, but it still feels radical to be anti-space exploration. It’s not that common, or at least it’s not expressed often. Maybe that’s because we don’t feel it as a concrete thing that’s happening to us, versus other things that are protested more often and that feel [more direct]. Oligarchs going to space feels a little bit abstract. But I think that Butler writing that idea into her books was a reflection of Gil Scott-Heron, Sun Ra, and or other people at the time who were posing these questions like: What is the intentionality behind going to space? Who’s included in that vision? And, if we’re not included, why should we care about this? We’re just being exploited to make it possible.

It’s a reversal of what we think traditionally of science fiction, which is often about space and space exploration. It’s an interesting part about Butler’s work, but it’s also embedded in the show, this idea that the future is down here.

It’s also the idea that the future is not pretty and shiny. It has all the same problems that we have now.

In the description for Estella Butler’s Apple Valley Autonomy, you note that you used AI software to help generate the work, notably Midjourney, which has been sued by artists for allegedly using their work without permission. Does your usage of it hold symbolic meaning? Or is it merely another tool, as neutral as a paintbrush?

That’s a good question. I picked that platform kind of arbitrarily. That was just the first one that I used. I actually started fooling around with it because I wanted to have some of my students use it and I wanted to see what it was like. Through fooling around with it, I was like, okay, this could be interesting. I feel like so much of what’s generated through AI is the dumbest, most predictable things you could think of. And I thought, this is such a powerful tool, like what else could we do with it? And so, I felt that using it in this way, to imagine what [Butler’s grandmother’s chicken coop] would have been, was challenging the way that AI is typically used. But, as far as the platform itself, it doesn’t hold any significance.

A lot of your practice directly critiques technology—specifically social media and the internet as a “militarized” technology. But, in this new body of work, there is an embrace of technology, notably in The Monophobic Response, in which the group imagines the rocket test, not as a manifestation of militarization, but as the necessary path to the “somewhere that’s not here.” Have you shifted your thinking about technology’s role in our society and our future?

Even with my earlier work, it still uses the technology, even though it’s critiquing it. With this, I’m trying to challenge the ideologies behind the technology. I wanted to use AI in a way that it’s not normally used. I wanted to use the rocket in a way that it is not normally used. I wanted to challenge some of the beliefs that normally back the use of that technology. That was also true in my earlier works as well. Even when I started doing [A Refusal, a 2015–16 work in which Artist replaced every image on their Facebook with a blue monochrome and blacked out any accompanying text], it wasn’t because I hate social media. It was because I’m addicted to it, and so I thought that I might as well unpack that because it has such a force over my life. I wanted to understand what was happening to me. It’s conflicted. I don’t consider myself a Luddite, but I do recognize that these systems and technologies that we use reproduce a lot of these biases and beliefs that are exploitative or harmful to many people. I wanted to hold those ideas at the same time.

It seems like there’s some optimism or hope in re-contextualizing these technologies, that perhaps they’re not inherently bad or destructive, but that it is the humans that are using them and how they choose to use them.

It’s complicated. I don’t think they’re inherently bad. But the context that they work within is the same context that informs their development. The further we go in time, the more those values get embedded. I don’t think we’re going to get rid of [these technologies], but we do have the opportunity to challenge the values going into them. I don’t really like to endorse a lot of these technologies—and I don’t see [The Monophobic Response] as an endorsement of rockets. Rather, I wanted to think about the people left out of Elon Musk’s vision and what their relationship to rocketry is.

“Shaper of God” is on view at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn through April 13.