Animal, Vegetable, nor Mineral:
Works by Miljohn Ruperto
Major survey presents the artist’s expansive, collaborative practice, examining how we’ve come to understand and engage with the natural world, its histories, and futures.
March 12–September 14, 2026
The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is pleased to present Animal, Vegetable, nor Mineral: Works by Miljohn Ruperto, the first museum survey of Los Angeles-based artist Miljohn Ruperto (b. 1971, Manila, Philippines). Curated by Maggie Dethloff, Assistant Curator of Photography and New Media, the exhibition is organized in conjunction with the Cantor’s ongoing Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) and marks the institution’s second large-scale presentation of work by a contemporary Asian American artist.
Working across a wide range of media including film, video, photography, animation, sculpture, writing, installation, and emergent technologies, Ruperto’s interdisciplinary practice foregrounds the lesser-known, the speculative, and the arcane, probing how knowledge is formed, mediated, and understood. Animal, Vegetable, nor Mineral brings together thirteen major large-scale works, including a newly commissioned virtual reality project, to illuminate a wide-ranging, deeply collaborative, research-driven inquiry into the ways humans have made sense of their place in nature.
Engaging scientific, historical, and speculative modes of investigation, Ruperto frequently works with other artists, scholars, scientists, and technologists to create open-ended artworks that consider questions of ecology, labor, belief, technology, and the afterlives of colonialism. Spanning the museum’s Freidenrich Gallery, Animal, Vegetable, nor Mineral invites viewers to question inherited frameworks and to consider alternative modes of relation and meaning.