Ecologies

Mark Dion, Peter Fend, Dan Peterman

Smith Stephanie

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms – human beings-and a specific group of sites – a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the summer of 2000, evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document – in over 100 images – the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition.

Contents:

Foreword – Kimerly Rorschach
Acknowledgements – Stephanie Smith
Introduction – Stephanie Smith
Mark Dion: Roundup: An Entomological Endeavor for the Smart Museum of Art
Peter Fend: China Basin Plans: The River Dragon Breathes Fire
Dan Peterman: Excerpts from the Universal Lab
Notes

About the Author

Stephanie Smith is deputy director and chief curator at the Smart Museum of Art, an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago, and a founding member of its Open Practice Committee. She is an editor of the journal "Afterall", to which she is also a regular contributor. She curated the exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art.

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