In Conversation: Kija Lucas and Banu Subramaniam
Moderated by Marthine Satris
Saturday, October 11, 2025 | 2:00 p.m.
SFAC Main Gallery
Free and open to the public
To Bright Disturbances exhibiting artist Kija Lucas and author Banu Subramaniam come together to discuss the ways in which plant science has been shaped by European colonialism and how they are subverting the system through their work.
Moderated by Marthine Satris
To Bright Disturbances is a group exhibition which explores land use, and in particular the ways in which we utilize the land can be at many times extractive, devastating, and at times, restorative. It will be on view in the Main Gallery through December 13, 2025.
About the Speakers
San Francisco Bay Area artist Kija Lucas uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage, and inheritance. She is interested in how ideas are passed down and seemingly inconsequential moments create changes that last generations. Lucas has exhibited her work at The Mills College Art Museum, The Palo Alto Art Center, The Guardhouse with For-Site, SF Camerawork, and The International Center for Photography. She has been an artist in residence at Montalvo Arts Center and Recology San Francisco.
Marthine Satris is the Associate Publisher at Heyday, the nonprofit book publisher in Berkeley dedicated to place-rooted nonfiction, where she particularly works on books about California's natural world and our relationship to it. Her own prose and poetry has been published in The San Francisco Chronicle, Contemporary Literature, Flyway Journal, Zyzzyva, Filter Feeder, and The Oakland Review of Books, among other outlets.
Banu Subramaniam is the Luella LaMer Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology. Author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024), Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019), Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Banu’s current work focuses on decolonizing botany, nativism in plant biology, and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in India.
