This multiyear project engages Northern California’s wildfire crisis. Through a cycle of gatherings in wildfire burn zones, an interdisciplinary ensemble of landscape architects, artists, Native land stewards, fire ecologists, survivor community members, and other participants inhabit wildfire burn zones in the long tail of disaster, returning to these spaces as resurgent fire ecologies transform the land and speculative real estate recolonizes it. With fieldwork and exchange, participants work experimentally to generate reparative pyroculture and create a culminating series of site-specific actions in the region’s burn zones, accompanied by an exhibition at di Rosa and the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center.

Gavin Kroeber creates projects that blur artistic and curatorial modes of authorship, poaching from visual art and urbanism to interrogate the cultural dynamics of power and their expression in the poetics of place. He is lead organizer for Laboratory for Suburbia, a critical art and design thinktank, a 2024 Creative Capital Awardee, a 2022 Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow, and was awarded the Meadows Prize by the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. He frequently orchestrates interdisciplinary gatherings that route participants through cityscapes—such as New Cities, Future Ruins (2016) and Dwell in Other Futures: Art / Urbanism / Midwest (2018)—and explores landscape through decolonial and posthumanist lenses—in projects such as Art + Landscape STL (2018–19), presented by the HKW (Berlin) and G-CADD (St. Louis) and Landscape Experience (2015) at Mildred’s Lane (PA). He holds a master’s of design studies from Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) and lectures at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art.

Twyla Ruby is associate curator for di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, where she oversees a dynamic exhibition program highlighting emerging and mid-career artists working in Northern California; and tells the story Northern California art from the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first centuries using the center’s unparalleled collection.

Nicole Myers-Lim (Pomo) is the executive director of the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center, where she works to develop exhibits, educational programs, and curricular resources that represent Native American perspectives. She founded the Tribal Youth Ambassadors program in 2010 the program received the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from the President’s Committee on Arts and Humanities in 2016. She regularly conducts cultural competency training for K through 12 educators and consults on cultural intelligence training and the elimination of historical bias from California curricula. She conducts professional development, consulting and training on the decolonization of Native American narratives, research, collections, and partnerships and cofacilitates the Native American Museum Studies Institute at Joseph Myers Center for Native American Issues at the University of California, Berkeley. She has earned advanced degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and University of San Francisco School of Law.

Margo Robbins (Yurok) is the cofounder and president of the Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC). She is one of the key planners and organizers of the Cultural Burn Training Exchange (TREX) that takes place on the Yurok Reservation twice a year. She is also a colead and advisor for the Indigenous People’s Burn Network. Robbins comes from the traditional Yurok village of Morek and is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe. She gathers and prepares traditional food and medicine, is a basket weaver, and regalia maker. She is the Indian Education Director for the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School district, a mom, and a grandma.

Brett Milligan and Emily Schlickman are the authors of the new book Design by Fire: Resistance, Co-Creation, and Retreat in the Pyrocene (Routledge, 2023) and curators of the exhibition Pyro Futures. They are both professors of landscape architecture and environmental design at the University of California, Davis. Milligan is also director of the Metamorphic Landscapes Lab, dedicated to prototyping landscape-based adaptations to conditions of accelerated climatic and environmental change, through extensive fieldwork and transdisciplinary design research. Much of his work is based in California, undoing and reworking colonial legacies of land reclamation, water infrastructure, flood control, and fire suppression. He is a cofounder of the Dredge Research Collaborative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to exploring the human alteration and design of sedimentary landscapes, and coauthor of the book Silt Sand Slurry: Dredging, Sediment, and the Worlds We Are Making (Applied Research and Design, 2024). Schlickman’s research and creative work sits along two primary axes—1) how to support climate adaptation through landscape stewardship and land use planning techniques and 2) how to experiment with and critically evaluate emerging tools and technologies for design. Her current work on wildfire adaptation aims to collectively shift perceptions of and relationships with fire by challenging normative approaches in the field and offering alternatives that foreground care and decolonization. Prior to the University of California, Davis, Schlickman worked professionally as a landscape and urban designer and a practice-based researcher.

Founded in 1997, and located in scenic Napa Valley, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art engages its community in the connective power of art and nature through its permanent collection of Northern California art and thought-provoking educational programs that inspire creativity and curiosity.

The purpose of the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center is to culturally enrich and benefit the people of California and the general public. The goals of the Museum and Cultural Center are to educate the public about California Indian history and cultures, to showcase California Indian cultures, to enhance and facilitate these cultures and traditions through educational and cultural activities, to preserve and protect California Indian cultural and intellectual properties, and to develop relationships with other indigenous groups.