Masumi Hayashi's EPA Superfund panoramas were included in this landmark ecofeminist exhibition — a Getty-backed survey of 18 international artists linking gender oppression and environmental destruction. The show's subsequent presentation at West Den Haag in The Hague brought Hayashi's work to an international stage.
An International Exhibition in Two Cities
Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism opened at The Brick in Los Angeles on September 15, 2024 — the inaugural exhibition at the organization’s new permanent home. It then traveled to West Den Haag in The Hague, Netherlands, where it was on view February 28 through July 27, 2025, in the former American Embassy at Lange Voorhout 102.
The show brought together eighteen international artists and collectives presenting new ways of thinking-with — rather than against — the natural environment. It was the product of years of curatorial research supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and received lead support from Getty/PST ART.
Masumi Hayashi in the Los Angeles Presentation
Masumi Hayashi was among the eighteen artists featured in the Los Angeles presentation at The Brick. Her inclusion placed her work in direct conversation with a living international movement — and confirmed what her practice had always argued: that the poisoning of land and the erasure of communities are inseparable acts.
Three Works from the EPA Superfund Series
Industrial Excess Landfill
Uniontown, Ohio, 1990
32 × 26 in. — Courtesy of the Masumi Hayashi Foundation
Summit National
Deerfield Township, Ohio, 1990
30 × 27 in. — Courtesy of the Masumi Hayashi Foundation
Republic Steel Quarry, Site 666
Elyria, Ohio, 1989
40 × 20 in. — Courtesy Stephen White
These three panoramic photo collages — all made between 1989 and 1990 — document EPA Superfund sites in Ohio at a moment when federal remediation was just beginning. Each assembles dozens of individual photographs into a fractured panorama that refuses the false clarity of a single frame. The collage form formally enacts what the sites themselves represent: landscapes broken by industrial extraction and only partially put back together.
Explore the full EPA Superfund Series →
Ecofeminism as Framework
Ecofeminism, the theoretical foundation of this exhibition, locates critical connections between the oppression of women and the exploitation of natural resources. Both, the argument runs, are products of the same hierarchical logic — the same systems that treat bodies as expendable also treat land as disposable.
Hayashi’s EPA Superfund series sits precisely at this intersection. These are not images of abstract environmental degradation. They are records of what happens to specific places — and the people around them — when industrial economics are permitted to externalize their costs. Women, children, and low-income communities bear the health consequences of contaminated groundwater, soil, and air in numbers that map directly onto other axes of vulnerability.
The exhibition’s themes spanned social ecologies, indigenous cosmologies, hydrofeminism, plant knowledge, and speculative futures. Hayashi’s historical works from 1989 and 1990 anchored this survey in concrete American precedent: this is not a new crisis. These photographs are evidence.
The Journey to The Hague
That Life on Earth traveled to West Den Haag — housed in the former American Embassy on Lange Voorhout, The Hague — is not incidental. The Hague is home to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. It is a city whose architecture is built around the premise of international accountability.
The former American Embassy is now a contemporary art center. An exhibition about environmental and gender justice, tracing in part the consequences of American industrial policy, occupied those rooms from February through July 2025. The Hague presentation was part of the Road to Summit program organized by Just Peace The Hague, connecting art and international human rights frameworks.
About the Exhibition
Participating artists: Alliance of the Southern Triangle · Alicia Barney Caldas · Meech Boakye · Carolina Caycedo · Francesca Gabbiani · Masumi Hayashi · Institute of Queer Ecology · Kite · Leslie Labowitz Starus · Maria Maea · Otobong Nkanga · yétúndé olagbaju · Alicia Piller · Aviva Rahmani · Tabita Rezaire · Yo-E Ryou · Emilija Škarnulytė · A.L. Steiner
Curator: Catherine Taft, Deputy Director and Curator, The Brick
Funders: Getty/PST ART (lead) · Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts · National Endowment for the Arts · Knox Foundation · Hillenburg Family Foundation · Teiger Foundation · Mike Kelley Foundation · Wilhelm Family Foundation
Scholarly publication: A fully illustrated volume edited by Catherine Taft and Jane McFadden, with contributions from critics and scholars, is forthcoming from Inventory Press (2025).
Explore Hayashi’s EPA Superfund Series
Life on Earth positioned Hayashi’s Superfund work within a contemporary international conversation about environmental justice and ecofeminism. The EPA Superfund series — sixteen panoramic photo collages made between 1989 and 1995 — documents contaminated sites across Ohio and the industrial Midwest.
Each collage assembles dozens of individual photographs into a single fractured panorama, creating images that feel simultaneously documentary and formal — evidence and elegy.
View the full EPA Superfund Series →
Masumi Hayashi (1945–2006) was a Japanese American artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the SFMOMA, Akron Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and dozens of institutional collections. The Masumi Hayashi Foundation maintains her archive and promotes the ongoing study of her practice.