Join us for a lively and insightful conversation between featured Art + Nature artist Andre Woodward and renowned art critic, Shana Nys Dambrot, Arts Editor at L.A. Weekly.

Woodward’s Art + Nature installation at the Laguna Art Museum, Burghers of Cali: A Ballad of Redwood Spirits, whimsically references Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais and poses penetrating questions about our complex human relationships with the natural world and, specifically, California’s Coastal Redwoods, the tallest trees on earth able to live to be 2,500 years old. Shana Nys Dambrot brings her voice and insight to help further our understanding of this encounter of art and nature as we shift from celebration to urgency.

Advance tickets recommended.

Museum members: $12

Non-members: $18

Andre Woodward is a Southern California artist whose work examines the very complicated relationship we have with nature. Born in Newport Beach, he received an MFA Cum Laude from California State University Long Beach a BA form The University of California at Irvine. Woodward’s work has been exhibited internationally and featured in print form in The Language of Mixed-Media Sculpture, My Green City, and Sculpture Magazine. Woodward has received several honors, including a Center for Creative Innovation Grant and the 2011 Visions from the New California award. Andre Woodward’s intriguing sculptures address the interconnectedness of man and nature. He reconfigures the mundane into multi-sensory installations that focus on the perception of reality, proffering a fascinating paradox of interconnectivity and individuality. His passion for understanding and conceptualizing systems has led to his oeuvre embracing unusual combinations of media that create a powerful force field. His most recent work examines the lives of the oldest, heaviest, and tallest living organisms on the planet: Ancient Bristlecones, Giant Sequoia, and Coastal Redwoods. “Woodward casts trees in concrete, almost as a strange play on the traditions of bonsai. combining his passion for biology and fine art, he has long been interested in the contemporary landscape that surrounds us-concrete parking lots pressing down the roots of trees: the façade of heavily manicured parks and neighborhoods; and the constant push and pull of negotiating an environment made up of both the natural and manmade. His sculptures nod to the cubes of Donald Judd, while foliage outgrowth interrupts the severity of Judd’s minimalism. Woodward states, ” I think of the work in terms of a paradox, which leads to the gaining of a sort of spiritual awareness. The truth of the matter is that our human environment is dictated by a perpetual struggle for control for control between the human and natural environments, where at any given moment one or the other will have the advantage.” Grace Kook Anderson

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. She is the Arts Editor for the L.A. Weekly, and a contributor to Flaunt, Artillery, and other culture publications. She studied Art History at Vassar College, curates and juries exhibitions, writes prolifically for exhibition catalogs and monographic publications, and speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally. She is the recipient of the 2022 Mozaik Future Art Writers Prize, the 2022 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, and the LA Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Critic of the Year award for 2022.