LOS ANGELES, CA.- This fall, in a multifaceted effort, The Broad will present a free collection exhibition, offsite public reforestation project, and series of programs connected with the legacy of Joseph Beuys’s art and environmental advocacy. The exhibition Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature is organized by The Broad’s curator Sarah Loyer with Beuys scholar Andrea Gyorody, director of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University. It will coincide with a major reforestation initiative, Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar, as part of Getty’s landmark arts event PST ART: Art & Science Collide. These dual projects present Beuys’s work and practice as more urgent than ever before, as the planet’s climate continues to warm.

Opening on November 16, 2024, the exhibition will present over 400 artworks that illuminate Beuys’s practice as a model for direct environmental action, drawing from the Broad’s extensive holdings of the artist’s work. The corresponding Social Forest initiative will echo the appeals for change seen within the exhibition, with an emphasis on the unique social and environmental context of current day Los Angeles. Undertaken in partnership with North East Trees and Tongva (Gabrielino) archaeologist Desireé Reneé Martinez and artist Lazaro Arvizu Jr., the project encompasses the planting of 100 native trees, primarily coast live oaks, in Elysian Park in Los Angeles and additional plantings at Kuruvungna Village Springs in West L.A.

“This exhibition marks the first time we are displaying our uniquely deep collection of Joseph Beuys’s important and extensive multiples at The Broad, and, through Social Forest, our first permanent offsite project,” said Joanne Heyler, Founding Director of The Broad. “Beuys’s focus on democracy and environmental justice remains deeply relevant today, and both our exhibition and the offsite project additionally underscore Beuys’s belief in communicating with a wide audience. Through his innovative concept of ‘social sculpture,’ he demonstrated the power of art to connect and uplift—affirming the resilience of humans to reconcile with each other and with the past, and seed a better, more just future.”

Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature will prominently highlight the artist’s “multiples,” spanning from 1965 to 1985. Arranged thematically throughout the first-floor galleries, the multiples are editioned objects made to be sold or given away, more accessible than singular, large-scale pieces. Iconic works such as Sled (1969) and Felt Suit (1970) join lesser-known multiples such as Rhine Water Polluted (1981), a bottle of river water that exemplifies the artist’s approach to artmaking, using humble materials to draw attention to social conditions and environmental issues, such as the contamination of the Rhine River. This expansive array of historical works will show how Beuys transformed the medium of sculpture, with his political concerns at the forefront.

“Joseph Beuys revolutionized contemporary artmaking, modeling how environmental and political consciousness can be fused with sculpture, performance, and even everyday interactions between communities and individuals,” said Loyer. “His work asks us to explore the past actively and find ways we can disrupt, change, and transform our world for the better through creativity, which he believed was inherent to human experience.”

The reforestation project is inspired by Beuys’s profoundly influential work 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks). Beuys’s action—part performance, part installation—began in 1982 and involved planting 7,000 trees accompanied by stone markers throughout Kassel, Germany, as a means to collectively reckon with the traumas of World War II. “It is hard to overstate the impact of 7000 Oaks, whether on the city of Kassel, on the major exhibition documenta, staged every five years in the city, or on the history of ecological art,” said Gyorody. “Beuys surmounted every hurdle imaginable bureaucratic, financial, ideological—to realize this work, and countless artists since have looked to this project as a beacon of what strong vision and immense dedication can achieve.”

Centering the unique cultural, historical, and environmental context of Los Angeles, Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar brings new meaning to this reforestation action four decades later, in a vastly different landscape that also demands reconciliation. The project addresses two central themes: first, ecology and environmental repair; and second, confronting historical trauma toward restoration. The title Social Forest expresses the connection between humans and the environment, while Oaks of Tovaangar names the land in the Tongva (Gabrielino) language.

The project is part of an ongoing reckoning with the historic and current impacts of colonialism and white supremacy occurring in the United States. With this context at the forefront, Social Forest is shaped in partnership with leaders from the Tongva community, in recognition of the deep history of the Tongva people who have called this land home for thousands of years, and celebrating their thrivance—a term that indicates radical prosperity and resistance, beyond base survival. “We are creating an artful process to negotiate our self in relationship to nature,” said Arvizu Jr. “It is a collective activity that becomes a gift to future generations.”

To execute the planting of 100 California native oak trees in Elysian Park’s Chávez Ridge area, The Broad has partnered with North East Trees, a community-based non profit that engages in conservation projects throughout the city of Los Angeles. Similar to 7000 Oaks, which employed the use of basalt stones local to Germany to mark each planting, each of the new trees along Park Row Drive will grow next to an accompanying naturally shaped boulder made of sandstone local to Los Angeles. At Kuruvungna Village Springs, a sacred Tongva site where a natural spring emerges, five oak trees will be planted accompanied by a stone mortar used for grinding acorns into flour, honoring the acorn as a traditional Tongva food source. These trees and stones support the Gabrielino Tongva Springs Foundation’s work to restore and steward this important site while nurturing Tongva culture and history.

Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1921. As a young man, Beuys was a radio operator in the air defense forces of the Third Reich in World War II; he was wounded several times and detained in a British prisoner-of-war camp before returning home in 1945. His subsequent career was dedicated to confronting and working through the traumas of World War II and its global aftermath. Art, and what he called “social sculpture,” became the medium to

work through these ideas. In the 1960s, he became a renowned professor at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and was briefly associated with the Fluxus movement, an avant- garde network of artists, musicians and composers that inspired Beuys’s early experiments with performance. In the late 1970s Beuys solidified his political commitments when he participated in the founding of the German Green Party, running as the Green candidate for the European Parliament the same year on an antiwar and anti-nuclear platform. These core beliefs influenced his defining work 7000 Oaks (1982–87), for which the artist planted 7,000 oak trees with accompanying basalt stones throughout the city of Kassel, as a means of environmental and social repair.