Lauren Bon is an American environmental artist and activist and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web.
Part of a global art cohort addressing our current environmental crisis, Bon uses living systems and infrastructure to create durational, large-scale, place-based projects, and performance, photography and sound to activate these works and engage her audiences. Through her multidisciplinary approach, Bon has carved out a space between land art, conceptual art, and transmission art. Her questioning of the status quo and persistent alteration of civic infrastructure demonstrates the power of artists to provoke change and shape opinion through soft diplomacy.
Some of her works include Not A Cornfield (2005-2006), which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct (2013), a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her studio’s ongoing work, Bending the River (2011-) aims to utilize Los Angeles’ first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the LA River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of downtown LA. This model can be replicated to regenerate the 52-mile LA River, reconnect it to its floodplain and form a citizens’ utility. A recent work of disturbance ecology, Moving Mountains (2024-), will use transplanted mountain soil rescued from the Topanga Canyon landslide to create a series of novel ecosystems along the industrial corridor of the LA River.
During Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a landmark l event that opened in Fall 2024, Bon’s work was presented across Southern California at sites including California State University Dominguez Hills, Fulcrum Arts, and the La Jolla Historical Society, as well as in her solo exhibition Concrete is Fluid at Honor Fraser.
Bon is a proponent of an Indigenous-centered Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) plan to advance long term climate solutions grounded in justice and sustainability. She and Metabolic Studio with Patrisse Cullors, the Center for Art and Abolition, Anawakalmekak, the Chief Ya'anna Vera Rocha Regenerative Learning Village, and the Gabrielino-Shoshone Nation of Southern California are co-sponsoring a petition for a Climate Resilient Los Angeles addressed to city, state and federal entities demanding immediate and long-term change and the adoption of this plan following firestorm catastrophes in Los Angeles.
Bon’s work has been exhibited at Desert X, as part of the collateral events of the 59th edition of La Biennale di Venezia; at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The Hammer Museum at UCLA; The Exploratorium; DePaul Art Museum; The George Eastman Museum; The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA); The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MoCAD); Les Rencontres d'Arles, France, and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. She has also appeared on panels at Art Basel, UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, and World Expo 2025.