Eliza Evans
Eliza Evans is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of climate justice, property law, and speculative finance. She transforms legal, financial, and bureaucratic systems into artistic and organizing tools, using contracts, mineral rights, ownership structures, and litigation as sculptural and participatory media.
In 2020, she launched All the Way to Hell, distributing fractional ownership of Oklahoma mineral rights to nearly 8,000 people as a collective intervention into fossil-fuel extraction. That work led to Landman for the Planet, a research and organizing project that has built a database of nearly one million mineral-rights owners and developed strategies for mobilizing owners around drilling, abandoned wells, environmental accountability, and land stewardship.
Evans is also a co-founder of the Mineral Rights Action Network (MRAN), which organizes mineral-rights owners around environmental harm, regulatory accountability, and collective action. Her current project Hellfire Holdings investigates litigation finance, securities law, and speculative investment structures as artistic media, asking whether the financial mechanisms normally used to extract value can instead be redirected toward climate accountability.
Her work has been recognized by Grist's #Grist50 and supported through NEW INC at the New Museum and the Curb Center at Vanderbilt University. Recent and past exhibitions include Amant, where All the Way to Hell is included in the 2026 exhibition Sentient Earth, as well as Thomas Erben Gallery, Carnegie Museum of Art, Bronx Museum, Missoula Art Museum, BRIC, and Edward Hopper House. Her work has been covered in the New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, and other publications.
Evans holds a BA from Oberlin College, a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA from SUNY Purchase. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
My focus is how matter is classified, disaggregated, valued, and governed. In the Salar de Atacama, lithium extraction depends not only on geology but on legal definitions of brine, water, minerals, property, and rights. I am interested in tracing how those classifications intersect with Lickanantay governance, corporate histories, royalty and benefit-sharing structures, and the longer succession of nitrate, copper, and lithium extraction.
ALMA offers a striking counterpoint: astronomers study how dispersed matter assembled into stars, planets, and worlds, while mining decomposes existing landscapes into separable commodities.
My questions are: When does matter become a resource? Who gets to define it? What histories and institutions make extraction possible? Who owns, governs, and benefits from transformed matter? How do Lickanantay concepts of territory and reciprocity complicate those categories? And can different legal or institutional arrangements produce more reciprocal relationships between extraction, communities, and ecosystems?