By connecting and supporting each other, we amplify our collective voice and the voice of the planet.
CICADA brings together creative visionaries from across disciplines to help amplify the voice of the planet and our call to action. Founded in 2020 by artists Ava Fedorov and Kat Kazlauskas, CICADA (Core Initiative of Climate Artists Demanding Action) is a transdisciplinary artistic collaboration. They invite other artists working within climate justice and climate crisis issues to collaborate on specific projects and use their collective capacity to express complex ideas and tell stories in ways that inspire action towards a better future.
The role of artists has never been more critical. Artists help us pay close attention to what is happening now, to examine and reexamine what we value as a society. Artists bear witness to what we are losing, articulate what is at stake, and visualize reemergence. Art fundamentally changes people, communicating in a language that speaks directly to our hearts. Art not only inspires action, but sustains it, while creating a record of how we feel, how we act, and what we hold dear, so that generations to come will share our stories, our struggles, and our triumphs.
The climate crisis is the definitive feature of humanity and artists have been on the front lines facing this reality and expressing their knowledge alongside scientists for decades. CICADA unites and supports these artists because working together we can have an even greater impact.
WHO WE ARE
AVA FEDOROV
Ava Fedorov is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator who is originally from a remote, wooded region of Upstate New York. With a background that also includes design and film, Ava pulls from all realms of her creative knowledge to create immersive art experiences that blur the lines of genre. She is passionately engaged in climate justice and environmental activism, which creates a thematic backdrop for her abstract paintings, installations, performances, writing, and conceptual work. She is currently exploring disappearing wilderness, haunted geographies, and the implicit nexus that connects internal and external landscapes. Using art as a means of bearing witness to these places, her work creates an abstract, emotional record of their landscapes while embracing the paradoxical experience of nature and climate cataclysm. Ava’s art practice attempts to offer pathways of understanding, adaptation, and collective mourning.
Ava’s work has been exhibited, collected, and published internationally and her short fiction has been a finalist for the Pushcart Prize and a PEN America award. Ava holds an MFA from the University of Hawaii and is an assistant professor of visual art at Cape Cod Community College in Massachusetts. Her recent solo exhibitions include, Let Me Hold You As You Disappear, at the Laconia Gallery in Boston and Performance Arcade in Wellington, New Zealand. She is also the co-director of Winds of Change, an annual multimedia social justice arts festival on Cape Cod.
KAT KAZLAUSKAS
Kat’s work is based in material exploration. She works across multiple mediums—glass, printmaking, photography, assemblage, and collage are prevalent in her practice. Kat’s work focuses on intercepting the waste stream and exploring the liminal space where materials transform from the mundane to the intriguing and beautiful. Light and shadow often plays an important role in her work—she views light and shadow as material. Conceptually, she is interested in how first world societies deal with excess and over-consumption in the name of convenience. She strives to illuminate the connections that bind us over borders, boundaries, and oceans more visible in order to bring awareness to our collective over consumption.
Born and raised in California, Kat received her BFA from UC Berkeley with a concurrent BA in Rhetoric in 2009. She received her MFA from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2020. Kat’s work has been exhibited and collected internationally. Her work has been published in New Glass Review and SuboArt Magazine. She was awarded the MOCA Honolulu Art at Thomas Square commission and multiple awards and grants in Hawaii and Washington. She currently lives and works in the Bay Area.