Pond in a Bowl is a free outdoor sculpture and poetry garden exhibition at 7th Ave. Garden (Central Los Angeles, CA) June 21-28, 2025. It will travel to Fort Worden (Port Townsend, WA) in September 2025 as part of Cerny’s month-long residency and public exhibition at Centrum.

Seattle artist Dawn Cerny is making six new sculptures for Pond in a Bowl that will serve as bird feeders, pollinator rest stops and poetry kiosks. The writer and artist Ed Steck is working on a series of texts that will be printed onto an edition of postcards and trifold pamphlets will be installed on Cerny’s sculptures for visitors to take. Cerny’s sculptures will carve out places to hold water, birdseed and nest-building material for the birds, animals and pollinators to take. This exhibition conceives outdoor sculptures as sites for collaboration with mutable conditions–human, animal, plant and insect; The light and the conditions of the place endlessly change. This project is tied to the environmental and social ecology of the garden or park as a place that invites hospitality, rest and survival.

The first iteration of Pond in a Bowl will be hosted by Los Angeles-based artist David Horvitz, who has converted a once vacant lot into the 7th Ave garden and art space. Artists Dawn Cerny, Ed Steck, Lukas Geronimus and Bristol Hayward-Hughes will install temporary sculptures in the garden and host a weeklong series of public readings and gatherings from 5:00 PM to sunset. The second iteration of Pond in a Bowl (Cerny, Hayward-Hughes and Steck’s public bird feeder and poetry kiosk sculptures) takes place in Fort Warden during Cerny’s month-long Centrum artist residency in September 2025.

Dawn Cerny Studio is a fiscally sponsored project of the Allied Arts Foundation.

If you'd prefer to donate by check, please make check payable to "Allied Arts Foundation" and indicate "Dawn Cerny Studio" in the memo line. Checks can be mailed to:

Allied Arts Foundation
Care of Media Law Group Inc.
999 N Northlake Way, Suite 207
Seattle, WA 98103