On view starting Apr 10, 2025
Curated by Antía Iglesias and Marion Boisseaux
Thursday, April 10, 2025
4:00 p.m. — 7:00 p.m.
The event is free and open to all. No registration is required.
Friday, April 11, 2025
3:00 p.m.
Conversation between Antía Iglesias and Marion Boisseaux, with remarks by Christine Scoffoni
Grasses (Poaceae family) are one of the most common groups of plants on earth.
They dominate about 40% of terrestrial surfaces and are found on all continents, including Antarctica! This family is hugely diverse, spanning crops important to the food industry such as cereal and forage grasses, diverse and ecologically important grasses that make up ‘savannahs’ in Africa, ‘steppes’ in Europe and Asia, ‘prairies’ in North America, and the ‘Cerrado’ in South America, but also bamboos! Grasslands are also the most threatened and least preserved ecosystems on Earth, often converted to farmlands to provide food for the growing human population.
Cutting edge research by the Scoffoni Lab at Cal State LA is investigating the drought resilience of this family of plants. Part of their evolutionary success can be attributed to the diversity of their photosynthetic pathways. Specifically, grasses performing C4 photosynthesis are more efficient at converting CO2 into sugars and spend less water than grasses, performing the more ancestral C3 photosynthesis pathway. Through their National Science Foundation funded research, Scoffoni and Boisseaux seek to investigate the hydraulic basis behind these two photosynthetic strategies, which is crucial in understanding how resilient grasses can be in response to climate change.
Artist Antía Iglesias has created a body of artworks directly inspired by the scientific data from the Scoffoni Lab. These artworks involve living plants to illustrate the scientific principles under investigation. By intertwining the literal and the poetic, the natural and artificial, the cultural and the scientific — Iglesias invites you into an environment that reflects the interconnectedness of life. Using artistic languages that range from the purely scientific, such as X-ray microcomputed tomography (microCT scans), to the abstraction of contemporary sculpture, Iglesias illustrates the complex dance of light and water that make up the invisible life processes of Poaceae. Through these artistic interpretations, the interconnectivity of human and non-human systems emerges into the light.
In a world threatened with famine, ecological destruction, wildfires and more, it is crucial that we understand as much as we can about one of the most common plant families on this planet. With all its great diversity, the Poaceae family has lessons to teach us yet about survival, adaptation, and even ourselves.
Antía Iglesias is an artist and PhD in Creativity and Sustainable Social Innovation from the University of Vigo, Spain. Her work combines artistic and scientific practices to address ecological complexities, using graphic art as a key medium. As a Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow at the School of Visual Arts, NY (2024-2025), Iglesias advances her research on art-science co-creation and interspecies dialogue. She earned several prizes for her PhD research, including 1st Creativity Prize of the University of Vigo (2024), 1st Research Prize of Pontevedra Deputation (2024), 1st Forestry Innovation of Ence & Chamber commerce (2024), Novos Valores Art Prize (2023), among others. Her work has been exhibited internationally, in events as the Taiwan International Print Biennial, Taiwan (2024), The Havana biennial, Cuba (2024) or Impact 12 International Printmaking Conference, UK (2022), among others. She’s the author of Un bosque de malas hierbas (2024) and co-author with Marion Boisseaux of The Multidimensionality of the Plant (2022), edited bilingüe in french-spanish and english-galician. Also, Iglesias has combined her hybrid creative practice with the dissemination of knowledge through scientific publications for both fields, published in journals such as Applied Science (Basel), Grafica (Spain) or Sonda (Spain).
Marion Boisseaux is a French plant ecophysiologist with expertise in tropical ecology. She earned her PhD in 2023 from the University of French Guiana and UMR EcoFoG under the supervision of Dr. Heidy Schimann, Dr. Sabrina Coste, and Dr. Clément Stahl, where she investigated functional strategies and microbiota of tropical tree species in response to climate change. Marion’s research focuses on understanding plant hydraulic traits, trait coordination, and their role in species’ resilience to drought, particularly in tropical ecosystems. Marion also has a passion for combining art and science to communicate ecological research to broader audiences. She co-authored The Multidimensionality of the Plant (2022) with artist Antía Iglesias, an innovative art-science project exploring Amazonian tree seedlings. As a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Christine Scoffoni’s lab at Cal State LA, she is currently investigating leaf and root hydraulic trait coordination in C3 and C4 grasses, advancing our understanding of plant water use strategies under environmental change.
Christine Scoffoni is a French-American plant biologist and associate professor in the Biological Sciences Department at the California State University, Los Angeles, committed to empowering diverse students through cutting-edge research in plant ecophysiology. She earned her PhD in 2014 at the University of California Los Angeles under Dr. Lawren Sack, where she studied plant hydraulics and evolution. Her research uses experimental and comparative approach in plant physiology to answer fundamental questions regarding the function of plant diversity with an emphasis on plant’s adaptation to environmental stresses such as drought and temperature. Christine is a leading contributor to the field of plant hydraulics, with a focus on leaf venation architecture and its relationship to hydraulic conductance and drought vulnerability. Her work has provided key insights into the causes of hydraulic decline during dehydration, the role of leaf outside-xylem pathways, and the interplay between leaf structure and water transport efficiency. Christine was recognized as one of the globe’s most highly cited researchers by Clarivate, and is a recipient of the Early Career Award of the American Society of Plant Biologists.
Wednesday through Friday
12:00 p.m. — 5:00 p.m.
Saturday
11:00 a.m. — 4:00 p.m.
During stage presentations
Open 1 hour prior to start time
