Matthew López-Jensen
Reading Trees
October 15–November 14, 2026
Equity Gallery is pleased to present Reading Trees, an exhibition by Matthew López-Jensen celebrating his ongoing work with New York City street trees and his recent publication New York City Street Tree Tarot (Verlag Kettler). The project gathers scenes of environmental resilience and stewardship into a 78-card deck for reflection, education, and divination.
The exhibition features large-scale photographs from the deck, bringing the trees and the urban environments they inhabit into the gallery. Visitors may also use a deck for readings. Accompanied by a book of texts and keywords to help readers interpret each scene, New York City Street Tree Tarot can be used like a traditional tarot or oracle deck, inviting close attention to the forms and conditions of the city’s trees.
The practice of divination, enacted through crystal balls, tea leaf readings, and tarot cards, offers a way of approaching change and uncertainty. Events that seem beyond our control are often shaped by our own reactions, actions, or inaction. Divination offers a view into current causes and conditions that presage change and provides pathways, through coded images, to intuit possible outcomes.
As an environmental artist creatively engaged with the natural world, López-Jensen reimagines the mythic tree of knowledge as a conduit for personal transformation while inspiring individual action and a larger cultural reckoning with climate change. His street trees become subjects for reflection on the relationships between urban life, environmental resilience, and stewardship.
Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based interdisciplinary environmental artist whose projects combine social practice, walking, photography, teaching, planting, cleaning, mapping, and research. A Citizen Pruner, New York City Parks Super Steward, and community gardener, he brings direct environmental care into his artistic practice. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in photography, and his site-specific landscape projects have twice received support from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. He holds an MFA from the University of Connecticut and a BA from Rice University and teaches environmental art and photography at Fordham University and Parsons School of Design.
Tree Walks with Matthew López-Jensen: Saturday, October 24, and Saturday, November 14, at 2 PM
The free walks begin in the exhibition and loop through the neighborhood to visit street trees in their various shapes and conditions.
+++++
Equity Gallery was made possible through a gift from Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence. Equity Gallery’s programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.