My practice involves learning about and incorporating the diverse sexual and reproductive strategies of the natural world into my work, and thinking through how biology, ecology, and botany have built systems for which organisms are knowable, and therefore, valuable.
My research is both experiential and rooted in queer ecologies, which bridges queer theory and environmental science. I am usually asking: what can we learn from plants, bacteria, fungi, and other symbiotic organisms, who have been alive longer than human beings, about our own species and its ability to survive?
Eli Brown is an interdisciplinary artist whose work in the field of queer ecologies spans sculpture, social practice, and public art.
Their work has been exhibited at the deCordova Museum & Sculpture Park Biennial, Flux Factory, and Creative Time X. In 2022, his large-scale sculpture installations were on view at Lopresti Park in East Boston, and at Franconia Sculpture Park, in Fraser, MN. Eli’s exhibitions and public projects have received press through Sculpture Magazine, CULTURED, WGBH’s Open Studio with Jared Bowen, and Chronicle 5 News. Within the past two years, Eli has received grant funding from the St. Botolph Club, Collective Future Fund/The Andy Warhol Foundation, University of Pennsylvania’s Ecotopian Toolkit Project, and New England Foundation for the Arts. Their writing and work have been published in the UK-based publication, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, and the upcoming Routledge's Artists and The Practice of Agriculture, the long-running, queer, sex-ed comic, Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf, as well as the self-published, internationally-distributed zine, Transplants. Eli received an MFA from SMFA at Tufts in 2018. Since then, they have taught courses at Montserrat College of Art, Maine College of Art and Design, and UMass Lowell.