Dig a hole…A nest Exhibition with Field Meridians

On view: Dig a hole…A Nest

An exhibition curated by Field Meridians, in collaboration with Ace Hotel Brooklyn on view until January 31, 2026.

Featuring works by

Sasha Fishman, John Grund, Cody Israel, Shannon Lai, Hannah Perry, Ana Ratner, Lily Saporta Tagiuri, Candace Thompson, Phoebe Tran, Naval Cemetery Landscape and Understory Landscape Architecture

About the Exhibition

In this season of rest and ritual, Field Meridians, an artist collective rooted in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, has invited artist-earthworkers to gather works around a “table” to commune, compost, and restore. Culminating in an immersive exhibition on view at Ace Hotel Brooklyn December 4 – January 31, the table is a site to honor soil as master composter, hole, planetary membrane, gravesite, and nest inspired by Wampanoag and Indigenous Andean rituals of burying food as an act of gratitude for the earth (Pachamama). 

For artists who also farm, garden, and tend to soils and seas, winter is an invitation to be still, slow down, conserve energy, and embrace decay as transformation. Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a text that Field Meridians has been in dialogue with this past year, also reminds us that rest is not withdrawal, but preparation—an act of resilience in the face of instability. Written in 1993, Butler’s vision feels startlingly prescient: communities facing ecological collapse, violence, and profound uncertainty. Yet within the novel, seeds of resilience take root—seed saving, foraging, bartering, collective education, preparing for emergency, and cultivating joy, trust, rest, and love as necessary practices for survival.

Dig a hole…A nest. draws from both the land’s cycles and Butler’s prophetic lessons. 

What new rituals of slowness, letting go, composting both grief and possibility, might sustain us? By holding the season’s lessons alongside Butler’s call for resilience, the works in this exhibition imagine how art and making can be both a mirror and a tool—offering ways to prepare, to reflect, and to rest together, even in uncertain times.

“Dig a hole with a stick beyond the boundary or perimeter of your workplace. What do you want to put into this hole? What do you want to give up? What do you never want to feel again? What will you excrete? What needs to go? Okay, put it in the hole. Now re-fill the hole. Now you’re ready. To re-enter. To build then elaborate. A nest.” 

– Bhanu Kapil, Ritual for Winter Solstice

About Field Meridians

Field Meridians is an artist collective committed to creating tools for ecological resilience through social practice. Our work invests in facilitating space for people to connect with one another and to our neighborhood by nurturing our relationships with nature. With our neighbors in Crown Heights, we are braiding together art making practice, environmental justice, and collective visioning to build a publicly accessible food forest—a resilient civic space and an edible ecosystem as classroom. Through site-specific programming, publishing, and radio broadcast, Field Meridians engages our community to lay the foundations for food sovereignty and infrastructures of repair. fieldmeridians.org