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Outdoor arts programs offer another way to connect with nature

June 4, 2025

On a Saturday afternoon in early spring, I watched through the thick branches of a pepper tree as singer Nyallah and a small group of musicians played soulful jazz.

In this tiny pocket of the Audubon Center at Ernest E. Debs Regional Park in northeast Los Angeles, a crowd of picnickers gathered for the intimate, outdoor concert, organized by Living Earth. Most were lounging as the band played, but a few kids were playing in the dirt and one had climbed a tree. In a corner near the entrance to the event, someone painted on an easel.

I ventured away from the music, following a trail, and noticed plants that appeared on the Audubon Center’s signage, including hollyleaf redberry and white sage. Despite living just a few miles away, I had never wandered into this 17-acre space prior to that Saturday.

That’s a familiar sentiment to Evelyn Serrano, the center’s director.

“We consistently hear, ‘I didn’t know this place was here,’” Serrano says on a recent video call. People will tell her that they found out about the community nature hub because they follow an artist who happened to be playing a show there. Sometimes, they’ll return for volunteer days.

“Nature is for everyone, and your entry into it is going to be different for everyone,” says Serrano.

Part of Audubon California, the Audubon Center opened in Debs Park, where they leased 17 of the 282 acres, in 2003. “We’re here to remind people that you can spend time outdoors — and the outdoors is free for everyone,” says Serrano.

The programming reflects that. In addition to volunteer days and community science gatherings, there are Living Earth’s concerts and Old Time String Band’s performances, on the third and fourth Saturdays of the month, respectively. Beginning May 23, the Audubon Center will hold monthly movie nights through the summer.

We’re not all outdoorsy people, yet nature impacts all of our lives. For those who aren’t science-minded, inclined to garden or don’t particularly enjoy hiking, the arts can be a meaningful pathway to engage with our local environments.

“Nature is art as well. It opens up our minds to different sounds, different combinations of sounds, different colors, different things living together,” says Serrano.

If nature is art, then it is a work-in-progress. It’s not the Instagram-perfect destination that we travel to so much as it is the spaces in our own neighborhoods that thrive when communities put in the effort.

“I think we’re in a world that’s so used to not being in a space that’s literally living,” says Maryam Hosseinzadeh, development and programs director for Arlington Garden. “We’re so used to being in a space that’s staged or constant.”

Keva Walker, right, and Julia Robles draw while listening to Shannon Lay perform at a community arts and ecology series called Living Earth: Music Beneath the Pepper Tree at the Audubon Center at Debs Park in Los Angeles on Saturday, April 19, 2025. "I love coming here because it is very local… It's nice to have programs like this that help bring community together through nature and music," said Robles. (Photo by Daniel Pearson, Contributing Photographer) — Keva Walker, right, and Julia Robles draw while listening to Shannon Lay perform at a community arts and ecology series called Living Earth: Music Beneath the Pepper Tree at the Audubon Center at Debs Park in Los Angeles on Saturday, April 19, 2025. “I love coming here because it is very local… It’s nice to have programs like this that help bring community together through nature and music,” said Robles. (Photo by Daniel Pearson, Contributing Photographer)

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On the day I met with Hosseinzadeh and Andrew Jewell, interim executive director for the nonprofit, water-wise community garden in Pasadena, it was lush. Purple and orange wildflowers popped out of dense greenery. A hummingbird flitted between trees near our meeting spot.

“It’s constantly responding to itself and also responding to the community,” says Hosseinzadeh of the garden.

Founded in 2005, Arlington Garden sits on a three-acre plot of Caltrans-owned land and first bloomed thanks to an effort spearheaded by late neighbors Betty and Charles McKenney. Today, it continues to flourish with a lot of help from the locals who pitch in during frequent volunteer events. Education is built into the garden.

“It’s not just a place to come and look and say, ‘Oh, isn’t this nice,’ and then go home and have your lawn and water it,” Hosseinzadeh says. “The idea is that we can inspire people to enact the practices that they’re learning here in the garden, get dedicated to the land, and really start to think about how they can impact their own little patch of environment.”

That education and inspiration extends beyond the volunteer days. Come here for Resonance, a yoga and sound event hosted by Living Earth, and you might begin to notice the similarities between music and the sounds of nature. Head to an Exploring the Mycoverse evening and you might be entranced by the mysterious world of fungi.

Mycoverse Potluck & UV Walk organizer and host Aaron Tupac, shines a powerful UV light on plants to show how different they look to animals who can see that range of light at the Arlington Garden on Monday, April 14, 2025. The wavelength of light changes the colors of plants, giving them an alien color. (Photo by Miguel Vasconcellos, Contributing Photographer)

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Founded by mycologist Aaron Tupac as a reading group just a few years ago, Exploring the Mycoverse has grown into a monthly celebration of fungi. They’ve hosted film festivals, book talks and art-making sessions.

“We love a good poem too,” says Tupac on a recent video call. The group will often open sessions with poetry. “We don’t have the language yet to describe how fungi work and how they live,” they explain. “That’s where poetry really helps — coming up with ideas of how to understand fungi better.”

Whether discussing fungi in film or sculpting clay mushrooms, the group activities help deepen members’ understanding of the large and relatively understudied fungal kingdom.

“Fungi eludes us so often because they’re not easily visible to the eye. Art can really help us introduce fungi to larger audiences by getting people curious. Just noticing fungi, I think that’s the most radical thing that art can help with,” says Tupac. “Once people start to notice mushrooms, or fungi, they’re all around us. I see them in my yard. I see them when I’m out walking my dog. I see them when I go out walking for a hike.”

Shannon Lay, left, and Buddy Hollywood perform at a community arts and ecology series called Living Earth: Music Beneath the Pepper Tree at the Audubon Center at Debs Park in Los Angeles on Saturday, April 19, 2025. (Photo by Daniel Pearson, Contributing Photographer)

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Just as the arts can be a gateway into the outdoors, they can also help us understand our role in its stewardship.

“The idea of having a stewardship kind of relationship to the places that we live and depend on is really critical in my mind to our survival as a species,” says artist, writer and designer Rosten Woo. Known for his civic art projects, Woo has long collaborated with Clockshop, the public arts organization that works largely along the Los Angeles River.

Recently, Woo teamed up with composer and sound designer Celia Hollander to create “What Water Wants,” an audio tour of an Elysian Valley stretch of Los Angeles that riffs on the format of a guided meditation.

I listened to “What Water Wants” while walking along the bike path that hugs the edge of the river, a birdsong entering my right ear via the earbud while live birds chirp on the left. The format is similar to popular, online meditations, but the content dives into the tumultuous history of L.A.’s water and arrives at the prompt for listeners to think about everything connected to the waterway and its health.

“I think that the art that I’m making and that a lot of other people are making is partially about trying to imagine a more just, humane, connected world,” says Woo. “I think a lot of that can work hand-in-hand with how you change the infrastructure of your local community.”

And, as Woo adds, “the natural world is infrastructure.”

People watch and listen to Buddy Hollywood and Shannon Lay perform at a community arts and ecology series called Living Earth: Music Beneath the Pepper Tree at the Audubon Center at Debs Park in Los Angeles on Saturday, April 19, 2025. (Photo by Daniel Pearson, Contributing Photographer)

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Not far from the river is Los Angeles State Historic Park. Since this is my local park, I’ve seen the way it has grown in the eight years since it officially opened. It’s now home to a monarch habitat and large, shady trees. When Clockshop hosts its Listen By Moonrise or Reading By Moonrise events here, the foliage is now thick enough to block out the surrounding activity. And there is a lot of activity here. In a neighborhood that’s heavy on apartments and low on backyards, L.A. State Historic Park bustles daily with joggers, dog-walkers and sports-playing kids. When the annual Kite Festival happens, it sees an influx of folks from across the city flying store-bought and homemade kites together.

Organized by Clockshop, who partners with California State Historic Parks on several L.A. River-adjacent sites, the Kite Festival launched in 2021 in part as a means to bring people together post-COVID. But, it also was a response to the proposed aerial rapid transit gondola system connecting Union Station and Dodger Stadium — a project opponents say could threaten the park’s footprint. Says Clockshop executive director Sue Bell Yank, the Kite Festival emerged from an understanding that green public spaces “are constantly threatened as well.”

Clockshop encourages people to make their own kites, with workshops leading up to the event, as well as a competition at the festival. With a crowd of about 5,000 people and growing, the Kite Festival is, at its core, a day of art and recreation.

“Kites are one of these universal art forms,” says Yank. “Seeing El Salvadoran kites in the sky, Chinese kites or traditional Japanese or Korean kites, it’s amazing to see all of that artistry on display.”

Through their audience surveys, Clockshop does see that events bring more awareness to the park. But, it’s not just about introducing people to a place they might not have known existed. “It’s also about building that bridge to advocacy,” says Yank. “These spaces don’t just happen. They were fought for by the communities around them, or they would have all been warehouses.”

She adds: “We want to invite people to internalize that and recognize that it’s up to them to preserve them and also be fighting for those spaces in the future in the neighborhoods where they live.”

Rowan Walters, 3, left, admires a drawing by Morrison Demolar, 3, as they hang out with their parents at a community arts and ecology series called Living Earth: Music Beneath the Pepper Tree at the Audubon Center at Debs Park in Los Angeles on Saturday, April 19, 2025. (Photo by Daniel Pearson, Contributing Photographer)

Outdoor arts programs offer another way to connect with nature Orange County Register

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Outdoor arts programs offer another way to connect with nature

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