Eco-Feminist Futures: Art at the Intersection of Gender, Land, and Liberation

Eco-feminism is both a philosophical and political movement that links ecological destruction with patriarchal power systems. At its heart, eco-feminism argues that the same forces that oppress women, nonbinary people, and marginalized communities are also responsible for the degradation of the environment. These interlocking systems—patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism—treat land and bodies as resources to be extracted, controlled, and commodified.

Coined in the 1970s, eco-feminism has been shaped by various global thinkers and activists. Vandana Shiva, a renowned Indian scholar and environmentalist, has written extensively on the link between monocultures in agriculture and the erasure of Indigenous women’s knowledge. Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American philosopher and activist, understood liberation as necessarily tied to place, community, and mutual care. These legacies live on in contemporary eco-feminist art, where gendered labor, climate resilience, and ancestral knowledge coalesce.

Ecofeminist artists imagine a future rooted in sustainability, reciprocity, and reverence for land. Their work resists the logic of disposability—of people, environments, and traditions. Through visual storytelling, performance, and material choices, they challenge dominant narratives about development, ownership, and progress.

Artist Spotlights

Carolina Caycedo

Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo is best known for her work addressing environmental justice through the lens of water and hydroelectric power. Her long-term project, Be Dammed, investigates the impact of large-scale dam construction on Indigenous and rural communities in Latin America. Using performance, video, and installation, Caycedo uplifts the wisdom of "river guardians"—those who protect waterways from privatization and industrial exploitation.

Caycedo's practice blurs the lines between activism and art. In one piece, she constructs large-scale hanging sculptures made from fishing nets and clothing collected during fieldwork. These suspended works evoke both the beauty and fragility of river ecosystems, while also referencing the social fabric of displaced communities. Her art honors the land as scenery and as a living, breathing entity with its own spirit and sovereignty.

Alia Ali

Yemeni-Bosnian-American artist Alia Ali explores the politics of textile, migration, and language. Her photography and textile installations confront the violent histories embedded in cloth—from colonial trade routes to contemporary border regimes. In projects like FLUX and FLUX: YEMEN, Ali swathes her subjects in richly patterned fabrics that obscure identity while asserting cultural presence.

Textile, in Ali's work, becomes both armor and archive. It speaks to the labor of women and femmes, to diasporic survival, and to the beauty of interwoven cultural memory. Her practice is deeply eco-feminist in its insistence that identity, environment, and materiality are inseparable.

Mary Mattingly

Based in New York, Mary Mattingly creates immersive, speculative ecosystems that propose alternative urban futures. Her project, Swale, is a floating food forest on a barge that travels around the city, offering free produce to the public. This work challenges land ownership, food scarcity, and the bureaucratic barriers to growing food on public land.

Mattingly's vision of eco-feminism is infrastructural. She builds systems that people can inhabit and learn from, demonstrating that sustainability is not just a concept but a practice. Her use of water, modular design, and collaborative construction speaks to eco-feminism as a collective, grounded movement.

Emerging Voices: Candice Lin & Olivia Chumacero

Candice Lin examines colonial trade histories, toxicity, and the entangled legacies of empire. Using materials like sugar, tea, porcelain, and indigo—commodities central to colonial expansion—she crafts installations that rot, ferment, or decay over time. This embrace of impermanence and biological processes mirrors eco-feminist values of interdependence and ephemerality.

Olivia Chumacero, of Raramuri heritage, blends film, ethnobotany, and land stewardship. Her project, Everything is Medicine, is rooted in traditional ecological knowledge and teaches community members how to relate to native plants, soil, and ceremony. Chumacero sees land as teacher and healer, and her work is as much about pedagogy as it is about aesthetics.

Creative Mediums as Ecological Acts

Eco-feminist art is not only defined by subject matter but also by material and process. Many artists choose mediums that reject toxicity, excess, and mass production. This might mean working with natural dyes, foraged clay, or biodegradable materials. It might also involve mending, reuse, and other traditionally gendered and devalued care labor.

For example, seed-sharing projects like those led by Peruvian artist Cecilia Vicuña become ecological and cultural preservation. Vicuña's work often incorporates quipus (Andean knot writing systems) and organic materials, forming a tactile memory of Indigenous resistance.

Weaving, a traditionally feminized craft, is reclaimed as a political action. Artists like Diedrick Brackens (Black, queer, American) use cotton weaving to narrate Black histories and ecological entanglements in the American South. His tapestries are lush, intricate, and resistant to the idea that weaving is apolitical or decorative.

Earthworks—sculptures made from natural landscapes—have long been associated with male artists like Robert Smithson. But women and nonbinary artists are redefining this legacy. Ana Mendieta, a Cuban American artist, used her body to shape the land in her Silueta Series, creating ephemeral works that linked identity, place, and ritual. Her performances challenged both the masculinist tradition of land art and the objectification of women in art history.

Global South & Diasporic Perspectives

Too often, environmental art is framed through a Euro-American lens. Eco-feminist art demands that we shift our gaze to the Global South, to diasporas, to Indigenous and Black communities whose land and bodies have borne the brunt of ecological violence.

Artists like Jumana Manna explore land, agriculture, and displacement in the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region. Her film Wild Relatives follows seeds' journey between a gene bank in Norway and a seed vault in Lebanon, highlighting geopolitical asymmetries in food sovereignty.

Black eco-feminist artists like LaToya Ruby Frazier document environmental racism in places like Flint, Michigan, where water contamination intersects with race, class, and industrial neglect. Frazier’s photography is a form of witness and testimony, a call to action grounded in lived experience.

Indigenous artists across Turtle Island (North America) continue to resist land theft and ecological harm. Cannupa Hanska Luger, of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota descent, creates large-scale installations that visualize Indigenous futurism and environmental defense. His Mirror Shield Project during the Standing Rock protests combined protection with symbolism, turning the body into a site of resistance.

These artists assert that climate justice cannot be divorced from decolonization. Land-back movements, food sovereignty campaigns, and anti-extractive art practices are all deeply ecofeminist in nature.

Imagination as Infrastructure

Eco-feminist artists are not simply reacting to climate collapse but building new worlds in its wake. Their work asks: What does liberation look like in an ecological crisis? What ancestral knowledge must we return to? What labor must be revalued? Whose voices must be centered?

Art becomes both method and model. It creates the conditions for dreaming differently—for seeing land not as a commodity, but as kin. Through ritual, repair, and resistance, eco-feminist art teaches us that imagination is not a luxury. It is infrastructure.

In an age of climate precarity, eco-feminist artists offer more than critique. They offer blueprints. In doing so, they remind us that a livable future will be built not by extraction but by care.

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Image by Mayur Deshpande