My research focuses on crafting ways to perceive, interpret, and conceptualize human relationships with the material world (living and non-living) that contribute to changing how we relate with it and with each other. Working in collaboration with activist and other community groups in solidarity across socioeconomic and racial difference is a central concern in my effort to create more just, livable, and joyful social and environmental relations. My work takes form as writing, sculpture, sculptural installation, and public projects.

In February 2023 the University of Minnesota Press published my second single-authored book, The Lichen Museum. The Lichen Museum considers lichens as teachers, drawing inspiration from their radical habits of being to explore parallel practices for human becoming.

I collaborated with the four-person art collective Haha for twenty years. In 2008, WhiteWalls Press published With Love from Haha documenting Haha’s site-based work.

I teach in the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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contact email: apalmer1 [at] ucsc [dot] edu