Lee Pivnik / Fruiting Body

Lee Pivnik is an artist living in Miami, Florida. Working across disciplines, he takes inspiration from living systems and other species to imagine a future based on mutualistic relationships instead of extractive economies. Permeating his practice is the idea of entanglement - the touching, changing, mutating relationships between species and landscapes. Through these intimacies, worlds arise —worlds of decay and degradation or verdant flourishing. His sculptures, drawings, and installations create a visual language for ecological entanglement, referencing fungal networks, epiphytic plants, and emergent animal architectures that inhabit South Florida. 

He co-directs the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), an ever-evolving collaborative organism that brings peripheral solutions to environmental degradation to the forefront of public consciousness. IQECO projects are interdisciplinary but grounded in the theoretical framework of queer ecology, a tool for understanding ourselves, our environments, our biologies, and our collaborations through queer lenses. 

In 2022, he began a long-term project called Symbiotic House, which reimagines the home as a potential site for climate care and adaptation. Symbiotic House will grow into a nature-culture learning center while enacting embodied mutualism as a design strategy. The project spawns from a personal desire to continue dwelling in a climate-precarious city through crafting ecological reciprocity.