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FRIDAY, April 24, 5-7pm

Amanda Janney of KM Mushrooms and Artist Sam Shoemaker present a candid look at navigating the “mycoboom” as working mycologists. From a mushroom boat crossing the Catalina Channel to sustainable agriculture for food security in California, they trace the gap between utopian promise and lived reality. Along the way are stories of burnout, scaling challenges, strange experiments, and occasional breakthroughs.

Threaded through this conversation is a shared inquiry into how humans and mushrooms can meet as collaborators, not just as food. Through his work as an artist and applied mycologist, Sam explores this relationship at the edges—building with mycelium, imagining new infrastructures, and working in mycoremediation to partner with fungi as agents of repair. Amanda approaches the same question from the ground level of daily life. After years of farming and hearing the same refrain—people want mushrooms, but don’t want to eat them, or don’t know how to cook them—her work has expanded into herbalism and extraction. Through high-integrity tinctures and functional blends, she translates mushrooms into accessible, ritualized forms that invite consistent use, meeting people where they are and creating pathways for deeper relationship.

Expect field notes and a light industry autopsy, with detours into mushroom burial suits, space architecture, and oddities from the beautiful world of decay. This is not a pitch for mushrooms saving the world—it is an attempt to reckon with what it actually means to work with them, learn from them, and consider what it looks like to incorporate them fully into our lives.

Please join us for this exciting conversation, which will include a mushroom tasting provided by KM Mushrooms!