MOCA Members are invited to participate in a special hands-on workshop with artist Lauren Shapiro, creating patterns with kiln paper that will later be cast into glass tiles.

Drawing inspiration from the Naples Botanical Garden’s Seed Bank, participants will engage with the surface details and histories of plants preserved within the collection. Through guided activities, attendees will help create low-relief forms to be translated into glass.

The tiles produced during this session and other workshops across South Florida will become part of a public art installation opening at Naples Botanical Garden in January 2027. Together, these translucent glass elements will form an interconnected screen, symbolizing the layered stories, motifs, and relationships contained within the seed bank as both a scientific archive and a living cultural record.

Lauren Shapiro creates sculptural forms ranging from vessels and reliefs to large-scale public art installations. Her practice draws from original fieldwork and site-specific studies, blending organic textures with geometric and architectural motifs. Through collaborations with scientists, and by combining digital tools with traditional hand-built methods, Shapiro creates works that reflect nature’s fragility and human history—serving as both artworks and archives.

Select solo exhibitions include Pastiche (2024) at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Miami; Garden Portals (2021) at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Miami; Future Pacific (2020) at Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami; and Fragile Terrains (2018) at Bianca Boekel Galeria, São Paulo, Brazil. Select group exhibitions include Intricate Oceans: Coral in Contemporary Art (2023) at Coastal Discovery Museum, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina; DesignMiami (2021) with Todd Merrill Studio; and Projektraum M54 (2017) in Basel, Switzerland.

Her work is collected by the Soho House Art Collection and the Jorge M. Perez Collection, among others. Lauren lives and works in Miami, Florida.

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