Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat
Fulcrum Arts is pleased to present Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat, a collection of works developed in relation to the artist’s August 2025 crossing of the Catalina Channel in a kayak made of mushroom mycelium. The exhibition’s central feature is the mushroom boat itself, which was built by the artist and stands amid the artifacts of its development, including extensive documentation of its fabrication, testing, and eventual use on open water.
Fulcrum Arts Announces Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat
October 10, 2025 – January 17, 2026
Sam Shoemaker crossing the Catalina Channel in his mushroom boat on August 5, 2025. Photo by Jordan Freeman. Courtesy Fulcrum Arts.
Fulcrum Arts is pleased to present Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat, a collection of works developed in relation to the artist’s August 2025 crossing of the Catalina Channel in a kayak made of mushroom mycelium. The exhibition’s central feature is the mushroom boat itself, which was built by the artist and stands amid the artifacts of its development, including extensive documentation of its fabrication, testing, and eventual use on open water. In addition to celebrating the success of Shoemaker’s voyage, Mushroom Boat marks the first major exhibition held at Fulcrum Arts’ new headquarters in Pasadena, California.
Thanks to filmmaker Jordon Freeman’s intimate videography and Shoemaker’s elaborate documentation of his process, the exhibition is a sensorial experience. Large-scale projections, time-lapse videos, and spatialized soundscapes situate the observer alongside Shoemaker in his studio, where he forms a boat with organic matter, and in the Catalina Channel, where he navigates twenty-six nautical miles aboard his fully grown and functional mushroom kayak.
Beyond asserting Shoemaker’s radical inventiveness, seen in the boat itself, the exhibition strives to demonstrate that the potential of mycology is accessible to anyone. As such, and to honor rhizomatic systems in general, Shoemaker is releasing an open-source compendium detailing his mycological research findings and methodologies. A hard copy of this guide will be exhibited, and a digital version will be freely accessible to artists, students, and amateurs interested in the possibilities of collaborating with fungi. Shoemaker releases this compendium with the hope that others will carry his research forward, using fungi—an organic, versatile, and renewable resource—to pursue responsible technical and creative innovations.
Sam Shoemaker in his mushroom boat after crossing the Catalina Channel on August 5, 2025. Photo by Jordan Freeman. Courtesy Fulcrum Arts.
“Shoemaker’s work explores the potential of sustainable materials in unprecedented ways,” remarks Patrick J. Reed, curator at Fulcrum Arts. “His crossing of the Catalina Channel in a boat made of mushroom mycelium prompts us to recognize that innovative creative practices can guide our efforts toward ecologically responsible modes of inventing, exploring, and living our lives.”
Mushroom Boat is the culmination of research that achieved its first benchmark in June 2024, when Shoemaker tested his prototype mycelium kayak at a marina in Long Beach, California. This prototype—Mushroom Boat 1—demonstrated buoyancy, proved the validity of Shoemaker’s mushroom boat technology, and provided the basis for a more sophisticated and performance-enhanced design.
Sam Shoemaker crossing the Catalina Channel in his mushroom boat on August 5, 2025. Photo by Jordan Freeman. Courtesy Fulcrum Arts.
The production of Mushroom Boat 2 began six months later at a surfboard-shaping workshop in Ventura, California. There, Shoemaker and an assistant constructed a kayak-shaped fiberglass mold, which they moved to Shoemaker’s Los Angeles studio and filled with over 500 pounds of hemp hurd. The hurd served as a substrate to propagate wild Ganoderma polychromum mycelium, which Shoemaker had harvested from a nearby parking lot. The inoculated mycelium grew for six weeks, filling the mold’s cavity and taking on the contours of a standard kayak. At the end of the growing cycle, the waterlogged mycelium composite was air-dried on a rotating brace, releasing approximately 400 pounds of water weight over the course of three months.
Credit: Sam Shoemaker, Mushroom Boat, 2025. Image courtesy Sam Shoemaker.
Sam Shoemaker’s mushroom boat during its production phase in Shoemaker’s Los Angeles studio, 2025. Image courtesy Sam Shoemaker.
Measuring twelve feet in length, weighing 107 pounds, and sealed with shellac and beeswax, Mushroom Boat 2 proved seaworthy during its inaugural test on June 2, 2025. A month later, at dawn on August 5, Shoemaker departed from Two Harbors, Catalina Island, accompanied by a safety escort sailboat, the TipToe, and paddled for twelve hours toward the mainland. During that time, he passed through turbulent water, encountered a whale, crossed an international commercial shipping lane, and battled powerful wind in the Port of Los Angeles. At 6:12 p.m., Shoemaker safely landed at San Pedro’s Cabrillo Beach in Los Angeles, California, and disembarked Mushroom Boat 2 for the first time since leaving Two Harbors.
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Sam Shoemaker is a Los Angeles-based sculpture artist whose work is a collaboration between himself and species of mushrooms. Shoemaker’s work has been shown at Craft Contemporary, Armory Center for the Arts, Vielmetter, David Horvitz’s Garden, Make Room, Emma Gray HQ, and OCHI, among others. He was also included in World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project at the California African American Museum, an official exhibition of PST ART: Art & Science Collide presented by Getty. Shoemaker has been featured in many publications and news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Galerie Magazine, W Magazine, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and Graphite. He lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by OCHI.
Sam Shoemaker: Mushroom Boat is made possible with the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Pasadena Art Alliance, the Perenchio Foundation, and the Pasadena Arts and Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division.
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About Fulcrum Arts
Fulcrum Arts champions creative and critical thinkers at the intersection of art and science to provoke positive social change and contribute to a more vibrant and inclusive community. Since 2017, Fulcrum Arts has brought artists and scientists together to tackle big ideas collaboratively. Our exhibitions, festivals and symposia, programs, and publications catalyze interdisciplinary partnerships and projects that open new ways of seeing the world and solving its most pressing problems. We are particularly interested in the ways art and science unlock each other’s potential—how art can make scientific concepts more legible, how science can bring novel approaches and tools to art making, and how creative practice can push both disciplines into uncharted territories of discovery and innovation.
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