Becoming Naturalized to Place: California’s Feral Cabbages

Aldo & Estella Leopold Residency | Artist Talk

Free & Open to the Public

Join artist and writer Alex Arzt for a multimedia reading from her forthcoming book, Becoming Naturalized to Place: California’s Feral Cabbages (Heyday), which explores how a seemingly ordinary vegetable intertwines with histories of migration, colonization, domestication, and belonging. Currently a writer-in-residence with the Aldo & Estella Leopold Residency, Arzt maintains an interdisciplinary practice in Oakland, CA exploring relationships between plants, people, and place. Her work encourages renewed curiosity about the plants around us and a deeper awareness of the ecological and cultural histories embedded in familiar landscapes.

About the Artist

Alex Arzt is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and gardener based in Oakland, California. Her collaborative, research-driven, place-based practice moves across artist books, essays, installation, lectures, interactive objects, and living material processes. Through long engagements with landscapes, archives, plants, and overlooked histories, she creates work that traces how human intervention, migration, and time reshape ecologies and produce new forms of relation and belonging. She runs A Magic Mountain, a Risograph press publishing artist books and zines, with publications held in the collections of Stanford, the Getty Research Institute, and SFMOMA. From 2018 to 2022, she was an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and has received grants from the Puffin Foundation and the East Bay Community Foundation. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her residencies include Ucross, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. From 2015 to 2023, she taught at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, SFAI, and VCU, and she currently works as a grant writer for the arts.