Lee Pivnik
September 2025
Sculpture
Miami, FL
Lee Pivnik (b.1995) is an artist living in Miami, Florida. In 2018 he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Sculpture. Working across disciplines, he takes inspiration from living systems and other species to imagine a future based on mutualistic relationships instead of extractive economies. Permeating his practice is the idea of entanglement - the touching, changing, mutating relationships between species and their environments.
Through these intimacies, worlds arise —worlds of decay and degradation or verdant flourishing. His sculptures, drawings, and installations create a visual language for ecological entanglement, referencing fungal networks, epiphytic plants, and emergent animal architectures that inhabit South Florida. Pivnik founded and co-directs the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), an ever-evolving collaborative organism that has worked with over 150 different artists to present interdisciplinary programming that oscillates between curating programs and directly producing artworks. IQECO projects are interdisciplinary, but grounded in the theoretical framework of Queer Ecology, an adaptive practice concerned with interconnectivity, intimacy, and multispecies relationality. IQECO explores the overlaps between queer cultural production and multispecies biological adaptation to reveal a vibrant and complex world of belonging.
Lee Pivnik’s work has been included in solo or two-person shows at Hotel Art Pavillion (NY), Mild Climate (TN), Biosphere 2 (AZ), YoungArts (FL), and Hi-Lo Press (GA). He has been awarded Knight Arts Challenge Awards in 2019 and 2021, and a Creative Capital Award (2025). Pivnik has been an artist in residence at Biosphere 2 (2017), Mana Contemporary Miami (2018), Atlantic Center for the Arts (2021), Deering Estate (2022–23), Oolite Arts (2024) and Folly Tree Arboretum (2024). Working as the Institute of Queer Ecology, Pivnik has presented projects with the Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), the United Nations - ART 2030 (New York, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami, Florida), Museo de Arte Zapopan, (Zapopan, Mexico), the Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf, Germany), Centre Pompidou-Metz (Metz, France), Museum Schloss Moyland, (Bedburg-Hau, Germany), Kestner Gesellschaft (Hannover, Germany) the Medellín Museum of Modern Art (Medellín, Colombia), the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade (Serbia), the Biennale of Sydney (Australia), Prairie (Chicago, IL), Bas Fisher Invitational (Miami, FL) Gas Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), among others.
BIO
2025/2026 AIRIE Fellows
2025/2026 AIRIE Fellows
July 2025 Sterling Rook
August 2025 Thandeka Mfinyongo
September 2025 Lee Pivnik
October 2025 Jewel Rodgers
November 2025 David Rahahę•tih Webb
December 2025 The Honourable Elizabeth A. Baker
January 2026 Jean Shin
February 2026 Shenny De Los Angeles
March 2026 Daveed Baptiste
April 2026 Ashia Ajani
May 2026 Coco Villa & Sheherazade Thénard
June 2026 Julius Karoubi
July 2026 Laurena Finéus
August 2026 Havîn Al-Sîndy
September 2026 Samuel Domínguez
October 2026 Sarah Doerfel & Vincent Scheers
December 2026 Ackeem Salmon