Lee Pivnik
Miami, FL
Living in Miami, Florida, Lee Pivnik takes inspiration from living systems and other species to imagine a future based on mutualistic relationships instead of extractive economies. Permeating his practice is the idea of entanglement – the touching, changing, mutating relationships between species and their environments. His sculptures, drawings, and installations create a visual language for ecological entanglement, referencing fungal networks, epiphytic plants, and emergent animal architectures that inhabit South Florida. Pivnik founded and co-directs the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), an ever-evolving collaborative organism that has worked with over 150 different artists to present interdisciplinary programming that oscillates between curating programs and directly producing artworks. IQECO projects are interdisciplinary, but grounded in the theoretical framework of Queer Ecology, an adaptive practice concerned with interconnectivity, intimacy, and multispecies relationality.
Lee Pivnik’s work has been included in solo or two-person shows at Hotel Art Pavillion (NY), Mild Climate (TN), Biosphere 2 (AZ), Dale Zine (FL), and Hi-Lo Press (GA). He has been awarded Knight Arts Challenge Awards in 2019 and 2021. Pivnik has been an artist in residence at Atlantic Center for the Arts (2021), Deering Estate (2022–23), Oolite Arts (2024) and Folly Tree Arboretum (2024). Working as the Institute of Queer Ecology, Pivnik has presented projects with the Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), the United Nations – ART 2030 (New York, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami, FL), the Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf, Germany), Centre Pompidou-Metz (Metz, France), Museum Schloss Moyland, (Bedburg-Hau, Germany), Kestner Gesellschaft (Hannover, Germany) the Medellín Museum of Modern Art (Medellín, Colombia), the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade (Serbia), Prairie (Chicago, IL), Bas Fisher Invitational (Miami, FL) Gas Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), among others.
Experimental concept rendering and process sketch for “The Living Room”. Lee Pivnik, The Living Room (Exterior Dream Sequence), 2023. Digital Rendering, Collage
Experimental concept rendering and process sketch for “The Living Room”. Lee Pivnik, The Living Room (Interior Concept Render), 2023. Digital Rendering, Collage
The Living Room: A Symbiotic Home
Lee Pivnik is a visual artist based in Miami, Florida, who studies living systems and other species to imagine a future that is based on mutualistic relationships instead of extractive economies.
Artist BioIn his work, Lee Pivnik relies on lessons gleaned from queer ecology to develop adaptive architectural solutions to Miami’s environmental precarity, so that he can design a “multi-use space for multi-species survival”.
In Miami, where many artists live in apartments without outdoor space, Pivnik is investigating how regenerative land art functions without direct access to land. This question has guided him through the design process of The Living Room: a speculative retrofit of a South-Beach studio apartment into an inhabitable aquaponics sculpture. Aquaponic systems drastically reduce water needs because water is recycled throughout closed-loop processes. Using water sourced from the areas around Lake Okeechobee most directly impacted by nutrient runoff, the sculpture will demonstrate that we can use living systems to remove excess nutrients from the greater Everglades watershed before they further disrupt aquatic environments.
The sculpture is biomimetic, based on the wild mutualisms already present in wetlands to shape a system where plants and aquatic animals live together for their mutual benefit. As water flows from ponds to planters, the plants remove the nutrients present from runoff. The plants filter the fish wastewater and return it to the ponds. Visually, the sculpture will reject the cold-industrial design present in similar systems (tanks, pvc pipes, etc) and rely on handmade ceramics, bamboo piping, and biomaterials derived from sargassum seaweed and pine rosin.