Lauren Bon is an 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.