Interview with Lee Pivnik
I met Lee Pivnik last year during Art Week at the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) Art Fair, where he represented Oolite Arts as Artist In Residence in the Everglades (AIRE) 2025 Fellow.
His solo exhibition "Chimeras" is based around swamp characters that have adapted to the ever-evolving south Florida environment by dawning his beautifully crafted sculpture/costumes to maneuver the rising tides of the future. Pivnik's latest project "Tidepool" is a multi-purpose fountain built in historic Coconut Grove. These two projects are byproducts of being born and raised in Miami, where his mother and grandmother each played a part influencing and fostering his love for the native environment. The concept of invasive species was tied to a lot of our conversation: about Pivnik’s beginnings, past projects, and his current work.
Steve Imas: I wanted to start by asking you about your background. How did you get into the ecological aspect of your art?
Lee Pivnik: I credit my mom in going above and beyond to engage with the natural world. When we were little she was raising frogs in a pond. I was also super into Pokemon as a kid, and that just naturally became an interest in biodiversity. The guy that invented the whole Pokemon world was an avid bug catcher as a kid. I think there's a real tie between both an understanding and interest in biodiversity, and then this kind of cultural overlay to it that I would get through that universe. I was always in art programs in public school and was always sketching. Whenever I would draw, it would be a butterfly, or flowers, the natural world coming back and being reflected in different ways. We had so many of these big coffee table books of birds. Really early on, I got into birding because it felt like a natural way to experience biodiversity. Like to go into the Everglades, to go and like see different parts of Miami, and I would make my parents drive me before I could drive.
S.I. Were you taking pictures of the birds? Did you ever do a "big year"?
L.P. So I didn't do a big year, but birding was what got me into photography and image making and then from there into nature photography more broadly. It started off as first a primary interest in the natural world, then through image making and environmental communication. I’ve been going to the Everglades since I was in middle school, and now I can go back to the Anhinga Trail and have this multi-decade relationship of seeing it change, and I think that that's also what I have this love of Miami through. Not just in my own lifetime, but this multi generational understanding of the environment and the ecology. Not in a very scientific way, but just in like stories of what animals were where and when and where they are now. Related to invasive species, it's not only that species are disappearing, but you see these super colorful lizards that were never here that are marching closer to these different areas as their populations expand. So it then comes into the art in many different ways.
S.I. What have you been working on lately?
L.P. For the past year, I've been working on this project that started out as a proposal to build a fountain at the Kampong Tropical Botanical Garden in Coconut Grove. You know this place?
SI. I’ve heard of it but never been there.
L.P. It's David Fairchild's historic home. He was the botanist who brought mangoes, avocados, and so many of the fruits to the country for the first time. If you could point to one person whose life's work reshaped the ecology of this region, it’s him. We think of Florida as a tropical place, but 100 years ago, it was a highly dense pine forest. So on that invasive species topic, for better and worse, the change in the botanical communities here from the introductions of these gorgeous flowering trees from Madagascar and fruit trees from Indonesia are linked to Fairchild.
S.I. I knew the history of the Pine Forest Community but not the fruit trees, I believed they were native. Can you tell me more about what inspired the fountain project?
L.P. I had been proposing to build a hydroponic fountain for the garden, the team there and I had been talking about hydroponics as an interesting frontier in growing food in Florida. In many ways, because Lake Okeechobee feels like a first stage of a hydroponic system right now. It's a heavily nutrient inundated water system that's enriched through runoff from the sugar plantations around it. It's this huge disruptive factor right now, causing algae blooms and then fish die offs downstream. But at its core, it is filled with the same kind of nutrients you use to cultivate different agricultural crops, and is not dissimilar from things I've seen at the Living with the Land ride at Epcot, where they teach you all about hydroponic farming as this tool of the future, which is funny because it's a ride from half a century ago.
S.I. That Epcot bit is so funny, please go on.
L.P. So I was interested in building a fountain that let me come in as an artist to bring an esthetic style that doesn't replicate the cold industrial PVC pipes and tanks in hydroponic farms today, but meets the Florida vernacular design-wise. It started as this food forest idea, but it actually spiraled in scope and got much larger. We built it down on the point that connects to Biscayne Bay at the end of the property and finished construction at the start of the summer. Now the goal is to get an environmental permit to pump bay water into it, and use it to cultivate sea sponges and oysters that can remove some of the E. Coli that's in this part of the bay.
S.I. That’s cool that Epcot and Lake Okeechobee inspired you. So the fountain will work as a filter for the bay?
L.P. Yeah a filter and oxygenation system to help improve the water quality in the kind of adjacent canal coming up to the bay. So I've been learning a lot more about marine biodiversity, and the functions they play in the ecosystems; the ways you can cultivate them in partnership with the ecosystem. I'm lucky throughout the project to be encountering many things I don't know, and the beauty of working in Miami so long is I get to tap into the brains of friends that do know. I'm working with Coral Morphologic a bit, and they're advising on the aquaculture components, and one of their mentors is helping design the pump system with me. So we're applying for another round of funding right now so hopefully, in the coming months, we get it all finished. And when we do, I believe it'll be the largest bio remediation sculpture in the South. It's based on a legacy of other land projects that artists have done, but all of them are from different parts of the country with different ecosystems. So I've been really excited about this since working on it for the start of the year.
S.I. This is so interesting. Was it always your goal to have that end result in the functionality of it? Or did it start as an esthetic design and evolved into having this dual function of something beautiful to look at, but also helping to clean the canal using these different creatures and systems?
L.P. I had mentioned in conversations with the property's botanist and the garden that the initial dream is based on stories my grandmother told about how the canals were pristine when she was living on them in the 50s. She lived off of Bird Road and the canal behind her house was as turquoise blue as the springs up north, and that she would float on an inner tube when she was pregnant, and skip ahead to my mom having me. And there's a story of me being a baby on the canal where my great grandfather slipped and we both fell into the canal, and he comes running inside like I've fallen into like a vat of toxic waste, like we have to wash him off. And so that's not just the story of her canal, but really every canal. It's been a form of slow violence and loss gradually that people have a hard time pointing to exactly what happened and when it happened. If you can't address the cause, you can't really arrive to a solution, and it really brought me into this interest in looking at Lake Okeechobee, which this year was listed as the most polluted lake in the country. Which is, you know, a terrible place to be when it's the liquid heart of the Everglades, where so much of our water system is tied to and comes from.
S.I. Yeah, not the claim of fame that you want for our water source.
L.P. True, if I could make any kind of fountain right now it would be on the shores of Lake Okeechobee or using that kind of inundated nutrient rich water. We're so far from there that we decided that we would incorporate a hydroponic system more broadly to educate people on how to grow things in nutrient rich water by engineering our own system with their worm compost to cultivate an oyster and sea sponge based system. I wanted the whole thing to look like a biomorphic conch shell, in part because my grandmother's family all comes from Key West, it would both honor her stories and the Conch Republic. The conch itself is a tool and a food source, like snails and mollusks who are underdogs in the natural world. These pesky things are a lot like the creatures we're looking to cultivate into the fountain like sea sponges that you would scrape off your boat. The idea had been to make not just a sculptural fountain, but like one that is engaged in active bioremediation. But one thing led to another, and it was actually working with the garden that they came up with the idea that we could put it down by the bay. The function of it has changed in conversations with the garden and what's feasible. They've really pushed it to be more ambitious, which has been really exciting to have a partner that trusts and encourages that.
S.I. So cool. I have many questions: what is the fountain constructed of? And did you have like a rendering that you put forward? I guess you had to, right, to earn the job.
L.P. Instead of a rendering, it felt more like part of the the natural process to make a ceramic model for it. The way it's ultimately come together is through oolitic limestone like small boulders and stones that are put together through masonry, and so it looks like the old coral rock houses in Coconut Grove, some of which are like on the the garden property. (When you see it in these historic properties and homes, it's like 100 plus years old and it's not gone anywhere in all of the storms that have hit it. And but you know it would be harder to build a structure that's like a dwelling out of it, but it's to build like landscape architecture with is still super common.) The fountain is mainly made first by compacting the earth, putting some foundations in, and then slowly building up with what ultimately is 25 tons of oolite and cement, and the cement is like mostly a binding agent and then a waterproofing agent in some other areas, and then the the central spire of it that starts to look more like a shell is ferro cement when you take rebar and chicken wire, and build the cement over that. Since that part is more susceptible to like degradation from salt water, we're still doing a kind of freshwater hydroponic worm-powered like fountain in the middle that'll be growing plants.
S.I. What are you going to be growing there? Ae you going to be growing vegetable plants?
L.P. I think we're kind of moving past the idea of the it's role as a food forest thing for people, and more towards plants for pollinators. I think what I've been doing while I've been down there is keeping a long running list of the biodiversity I've seen in the garden so far, and then trying to think about all of those creatures as like stakeholders, essentially shaping the planting structure. (In some areas, we've elevated the fountain, and I was joking at the very beginning that I need a really weird, cool contractor with me on this because there are many things I don't know how to do, and many things that are too heavy for one person. But I don't want to be laughed at when I'm like, we need some tunnels there for like the lizards to run through, and maybe we can get like this whole area for like blue crabs to move into. I need someone who gets construction but isn't gonna compromise the vision. And by absolute luck, a good friend of mine started dating this guy who is the perfect person to fit this role. He's worked in construction for most of his life, but is a really interesting botanical dude and plant expert and mushroom expert named Jake Millard. And so Jake and I were were working together on this for most of its design, and then I would catch moments where I would step back and watch somebody say, "Oh, and what's this tunnel for? And Jake would be like, "Yeah, we need that for the lizards to run through". He gets it, he's a great representative to interpret that to other people.) We're going to be targeting things for birds and butterflies mostly, kind of encouraging the native, animals and insects to thrive.
S.I. You you're not inviting the invasive lizards, and are you?
L.P. You know, it's really hard to distinguish when right now a lot of the crevices in the fountain are already supporting different ant colonies, which is great because that's like the basis of the the food chain for the sculpture. And so once the ants are there, then the lizards are there. But it's hard to say that the answer for only the native lizards because the lizards are all sharing space. I think the lizards are a really nice anecdote for the city because they're coming from all over. A lot of the ones that we say are invasive are actually just more like introduced and coming from different parts of the Caribbean, and it doesn't feel like a radical expansion of their range. But we also have these redheaded agamas some of the other farther away lizards there. I know there's actually research being done in the garden by a team at Georgia Tech that's studying the different lizards and how when they all are coming in also to this place at the same time for the first time in history, you're seeing like rapid evolutionary change in some of them as they're like competing with each other in real time. This is actually a nice segue because in all of the work I do, I'm really interested in not how evolution is happening from competition, but how we can find moments of change and growth from symbiosis, from things coming together and working together in new ways, and from kind of mutualisms driving this kind of change, and so I think the lizards are kind of doing both of this. They're sharing the same space and looking for the same ants at the end of the day. But they're not like predating on each other, and there's I think there's like six or seven different species of lizards that are living on the sculpture right now.
S.I. Very cool, could you go back to some of the different species that you've seen, as far as some of the butterflies and animals. Anything new to you that that you weren't aware of from your history of birding and from being out in the wild? Do you use a particular app for identifying them?
L.P. Let's see I've got I've got this list just on my phone. Yeah I'm a big iNaturalist nerd. I'm trying to log 365 species on iNaturalist this year.
S.I. Wow!
L.P. Which is a little goal I set for myself, and I'm only like 20 away from completing that.
S.I. Cool.
L.P. Still got four months to go. I've seen a couple different really remarkable things. As far as birds go, I saw a pair of painted buntings come through last year, which I've never seen in Miami. I've only seen them once over in Corkscrew Swamp at the Audubon Park. I was out there one morning, and a spotted eagle ray just jumped out of the bay. We get manatees coming into that canal pretty frequently. There's a croc that lives in the canal. And one morning, I came out, and I was there at like six a.m. for a cement delivery. And down at the point, while it was still dark, you could see like a dozen or so bats running the length of the strip of grass there, catching insects. Things like that then do inform the design of the sculpture because naturally it would be beautiful to put all this lighting in at night. But if you're putting in lighting, you're changing the insect behavior, and if you're changing the insect behavior, you're changing the bat behavior. And so some things are okay. How do we keep this functioning for the species that are already here, and also what isn't here but should be. I've seen one hermit crab, but theres not a lot of shells around. (A lot of the construction of the embellishments around the sculpture, I've been gathering shells from like people's shell collections that want to bring them back to the the shore as a kind of offering, and then some of them get cemented in, but some of them we can scatter around and hopefully repair that housing stock for hermit crabs.) When we had the the opening day for the fountain at the very like early morning when I was out there a pod of dolphins came into the bay, I had never seen them and it just felt like such a good omen for the the preview of the fountain, which we had earlier this year.
S.I. Cool. I love to hear about the different species coming into the space. Can you please tell us about the "Symbiotic House"?
L.P. I host a lecture series in the garden about symbiotic design with artists and designers that are working with ideas of ecological mutualism in their work. Yeah, so we brought in speakers from out of town in the first season, and then in the second season it was all local speakers. And right now we're programming for the third one, which will absolutely be running in the spring, but might start as soon as October. But this the new season will be a combo of people coming from out of town and people working locally, and so I try to balance the people that are doing really cool stuff here that really don't have parallels elsewhere with people that are doing this kind of ecological work in other cities that also doesn't have a local kind of precedent.
S.I. Are you finding similarities from these folks from out of town, that you can glean information from and apply to your work here?
L.P. Well, I think like two of the out of towners that really influence the kind of work I'm describing with the fountain are the first speaker in the series is an architect named Joyce Huang, and she does a lot of work up in the kind of Buffalo area where she's coming from an architectural background, but she often describes other species as her main stakeholders in that design work. She had a moment in Buffalo where she was seeing that people really just didn't like the bats in the city, and were talking about, oh, I wish I could just kill all the bats that are at my house. And she's like, what? And so she thpught, I need to design ways of living with the bats that encourages people to see them as kin and not as a pest, and so when she was down in town, she was doing sound recordings of the bats at night, and just from their little sonar chirps, she was identifying them like how you can use Merlin for bird calls, and then later in that season. Lauren Bon came in from Los Angeles, and she runs a project called Metabolic Studio in LA, and she's been the first person or org in Los Angeles to get water rights to the LA River, besides the municipality. And with that, she's diverting a stream from the river into her art studio, and she's made a kind of artificial wetland in a series of tanks and containers that mitigates some of the contaminants in the river, cleans the water, and then pumps it into different public parks. So she's building a alternative infrastructure into the city, and she has a kind of tagline that another city is possible.
S.I. That's fascinating, you are learning, sharing and applying some concepts.
L.P. So yeah, part of the curation is a little selfish. Like, I was trying to do this kind of work locally, but no one's doing something quite like it. Who can I find to bring in to learn from, and then like share that process of learning. So it's not just like me reading a book on their work, but bringing them to Miami, often for the first time, and educating folks here to see what's possible. Like Katie, they've done this over there. We could do something like this here, and the benefits.
S.I. I love what you're doing. This is so cool, Lee. Can we jump topic and get some insight from you on invasive species and what to do about that sort of thing? Whether it's you know plants, animals, insects, and and like, what are your thoughts on you know how to, I guess, alleviate or or, I don't know, what what can be done about these kind of invasive species?
L.P. Yeah, well it's funny. I think there's such a draw to them in Florida. I mean, Florida and Miami have more introduced and invasive species than anywhere in the country. I think the ones that we're selecting to bring here are so often coming through the exotic pet trade, and so there's this selection of species for visual flamboyance, not like we have these invasive species that are devastating other ecosystems in the country, like the Emerald Ash Borer and these other smaller bugs. I mean we have a parasitic worm that's hurting the the tree snails, but in so many cases, the invasive species that are disruptive here are incredibly charismatic and visually striking, like the the peacocks and the iguanas and the lion fish and the pythons. So to some extent, from an artist point of view, they're creating a visual language that the city really adapts and makes its own, which is remarkable. But then, of course, they're displacing or out competing, or the iguanas are eating the bird eggs, et cetera, et cetera. The pythons are eating everything.
Last year when I did the AIRE residency, I got to have the experience of going out one night to Everglades with a husband and wife duo that go Python hunting, and we were seeing just how hard it is to even find these snakes.
The three of us went out for like seven hours, and we spotted one, and we're able to to find and remove it. But the process of tracking these down in an ecosystem where so much of it requires you to slosh through sawgrass is tough. Most of the python removals happen from just the the ones that are encountering the roads and catching them when they appear at the edges of where it's easy to find them. So then, the actual potential to remove them through python hunts, when the vast majority of the population is probably inaccessibly off the roads. And those are the ones that are really harming the natural balance, right? But there's just hard to get to.) I believe the statistic is that over 95% of like the mammals in the Everglades have disappeared since the introduction of the pythons. But simultaneous to this is that like the liquid heart of the Everglades, Lake Okeechobee, is the most polluted lake, and so it's not that the pythons are the only culprit, but government mismanagement, habitat degradation. The rapid destruction of so many of these natural areas to become cookie cutter subdivisions and residential houses are also collapsing that population of things and in some ways the pythons become this convenient scapegoat for the state government to be like "the pythons are why you don't have nature anymore".
S.I. It's like Wizard of Oz, don't look at the man behind the curtain.
L.P. Totally, just look at the giant snake. It's kind of a flawless scapegoat in this way. And of course, I remember when I was in elementary school,I wrote a paper on that iconic image of the python that ate an alligator, and the alligator is too big and it exploded. Yeah, yeah. Like they're they're absolutely like wreaking havoc in the ecosystem, but like what isn't in terms of how we relate to the Everglades at this point.
S.I. So would you say that the developer is more of an invasive species than the python.
L.P. It wouldn't be a stretch, it's definitely at the scale of development in the state. There's what 1000 people moving to Florida every day, and most of them are getting these new like constructed, rapidly made homes that all kind of look the same and super homogenous, and so I think invasives do get a bad rap. I think maybe we could address our own species problems first.
S.I. I love that. That's a very good point, and wonderful answer.
L.P. Yeah, like you said, the way that the narrative is being dished out, because that's just the way Propaganda works. In the work that you saw last year at NADA, the Chimeras, they are imagining this future kind of apocalyptic version of Florida. Last year my anxiety levels had been high, trying to be a queer person who cares about the environment in Florida. It's like a lot of bad news constantly, and few moments that feel like wins. Maybe I could think about a worst case scenario for the environment for queer people in the in the state, and build a story back from there of like queer joy and multi species endurance that like really becomes a kind of salve for this threshold of anxiety I was dealing with. I have always enjoyed sci-fi and cli-fi storytelling, and there's a couple moments of really beautiful Florida literature and stories about this.
Karen Russell's The Gondoliers comes to mind. (This is the story of these sisters that are boat captains in like a flooded future Miami, and that they're the best boat captains. People call them the bat women because they shriek and sing at the tops of their lungs because they hear the reverb of their voices off of the debris under the water and then steer around it. And it has this like echolocation mixed with like this kind of like Venetian tradition of gondoliers that sing, and it's an incredible short piece of writing in fiction.) But I was like, we need more of this. It's such an interesting place to engage with the theme of the future when we also feel like we're in a proto Atlantis. I think back to the role of ecological storytelling I think it helps us really see the present differently when done right. So the Chimeras become this way of telling a story of a group of queer dissidents surviving this more and more hostile Florida, and they do so by being in this visual dialog with each other and with the surveillance systems around them, where the mimicry they're engaged in is this kind of over the top flamboyance of becoming another species and becoming one that to a person would so visually stand out. (But to like a kind of algorithmic security camera, in an expanded world of technological capacity and complexity.) I think that may be the only way you can outsmart that is by really ostentatious craft traditions that stupefy the cameras and visually confuse them. (But then, in all of the characters and creatures I'm developing for the story, I'm thinking about what species they become, and then I'm thinking simultaneously of things like the the Small Tooth Sawfish, that today is already critically endangered, and what kind of future does it have in the 2080s? And if I have never seen one now, and they're critically endangered, could this person who's in this giant sawfish costume, what does the creature mean to them?) I'm currently developing a Scarlet Ibis, which is not a species we have here today. But if we're imagining an ecology of the 2080s, I think it'd be interesting to bring in, this changing ecology. It wouldn't look like it does today. (And the Scarlet Ibises, there's moments where they've ended up in Florida, they look just like our White Ibises, but they're bright red, and they have the kind of like same experience that the flamingos have, where they get their coloration from shrimp. They live at the northern end of South America, the very bottom of the Caribbean, and you could imagine that either from an expanded range from the tropics increasing and the world becoming warmer, that their migration paths could reach Florida if conditions change, so they could like naturally settle here.) They're again such a brilliant, stunning creature that the times that they have ended up in Florida is more from zoos and the pet trade, like so many of the other invasives, and so I'm making now a human-sized sculptural costume of one of these Scarlet Ibises, imagining it as a story in the future, I would gamble that the scarlet ibises will be here.
S.I. Sounds like a beautiful costume. Well, when you make these costumes and you talk about it in like the story sense, do you write something as well? Is there a narrative that you develop in writing, or is it strictly storytelling through your photos and the actual sculpture? What's the process?
L.P It's a kind of it's a funny three-stage process right now that is a bit counterintuitive because it starts sculpturally for me. I am a sculptor, it's just generally the way I work and the kind of medium I return to. But then the sculptures are made to be worn, and they're not casual wearing. They're very clunky, heavy, and delicate. Sometimes they're made of shells and glass. This one will be a little more glass and fabric because a lot of the lightness of the bird feathers will have that kind of feeling to it. But they get worn for these photos, and then the photos add to that storytelling. But in my mind, it's right now all kind of early concept development for like a feature-length film that I'm simultaneously writing for it, as I'm making the character. As I'm making the costumes, I'm thinking about the characters. I'm thinking about like their backgrounds and of doing some world building on the back end that doesn't come through in its entirety in the sculpture or the or the photos. But hopefully, as it all kind of comes together, I think I have two or three more in this series I want to make before I want to try to pitch this film around, they're like origin stories for each character in a way.
S.I. Do you do storyboards too?
I do. I'm a visual thinker, so I'm actually doing more storyboarding than I am script writing because when it comes to my process, I don't think in terms of dialog writing. Film feels like a really natural medium for me because one because of my background in photography, but two because at its core so collaborative like this opportunity to work with people that have all these different strengths that you just don't don't need to have all of them. You canhave somebody come in who thinks in dialog better, and so I'm thinking very visually in my kind of development of it at this stage.
S.I. So cool! Wow, you're doing so much stuff. It's just it's really inspiring to see all the different things that you're multitasking on, and to be executing these beautiful results. It's just really impressive and admirable.
L.P. Yeah, I think that all projects that have a kind of like level their scope to this, they're all such long slog projects that I like to really work in these ideas or series or multi-year things where it doesn't all have to happen at once or or the one sculpture doesn't have to resolve a whole idea, but like can be of course engaged in these like ecologies of of thought, and so yeah, I think it's all slow work, but it it comes together incrementally.
