At a Brooklyn Bio Lab, Artists Trade Synthetics for Algae and Mulberry

A three-day exhibition at Flux IV in Queens brought artists from Brooklyn's Genspace community biology lab together around a single proposition: art can be made without synthetic supplies.

The show, Source Material: Genspace Biomaterials Studio BioArt Exhibit, ran during Climate Week and centered the artistic potential of natural pigments, algae yarn, and alternative clays. For the participating artists, these materials are not one-to-one substitutes for store-bought synthetics. As the exhibition framed it, natural materials can unlock new creative challenges and shift our relationships to art objects and processes at large.

The timing carries weight. After a summer of heatwaves and natural disasters exacerbated by the climate emergency — including a glacier and rock collapse in Nepal that analysts linked to climate change — the exhibition's organizers argue that immediate, systemic work is necessary to mitigate the human impact on the planet. Environmental advocacy is top of mind for many artists, some of whom confront the issue directly in their work and activism.

Four artists working with Genspace shared their visions for a more sustainable future of art-making rooted in local ecosystems, scientific inquiry, and community collaboration.

Becca Rodriguez: Natural Pigments

Becca Rodriguez exhibited "Puddle Pigments" (2026), a work made from mugwort, mulberry, and serviceberry pigments on paper, accompanied by water samples, test tubes, and video.

Her practice draws on a long history. Before the development of synthetic dyes and paint tubes in Europe in the 19th century — an era that produced the accidental invention of the color mauve — artists sourced colors from the plants, animals, and minerals around them.

Some natural colorants remain familiar to artists today: the indigo plant, the cochineal beetle, the turmeric root. But there are thousands of organic sources of color, and some pigments and techniques carry rich symbolic and cultural meaning, especially in Indigenous communities and artistic traditions throughout the Global South, including Mexico's historic cochineal reds.

Genspace, the Sunset Park lab where these artists work, positions itself as a site where scientific inquiry meets community collaboration. The exhibition suggested that the future of sustainable art-making may depend less on replicating synthetic materials than on relearning what local ecosystems already supply — and what new forms they make possible.