Join Webster's Department of Art, Design, and Art History (DADAH) Friday, Feb. 14, for a very special DADAH Friday Forum lecture at noon in Winifred-Moore auditorium (470 East Lockwood).  

Our speaker is New York-based artist Mark Dion https://art21.org/artist/mark-dion/ He is an internationally renown conceptual artist and art educator, and currently a mentor at Columbia University. Dione arned the B.F.A. degree at University of Hartford in Connecticut, which also awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2002. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and then the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program (1984-1985). He is an Honorary Fellow of Falmouth University in the UK (2014), and has an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (Ph.D.) from The Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia (2015).

Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world.  Appropriating archaeological, field ecology and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between ‘objective’ (‘rational’) scientific methods and ‘subjective’ (‘irrational’) influences.

Mark Dion’s notable solo exhibitions include Theatre of the Natural World at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018), Misadventures of a 21st Century Naturalist at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (2017), Mark Dion: The Academy of Things at The Academy of Fine Arts Design in Dresden, Germany (2014), The Macabre Treasury at Museum Het Domein in Sittard, The Netherlands (2013), Oceanomania: Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas at Musée Océanographique de Monaco and Nouveau Musée National de Monaco / Villa Paloma in Monaco (2011), The Marvelous Museum: A Mark Dion Project at Oakland Museum of California (2010-11), Systema Metropolis at Natural History Museum, London (2007), The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit at Miami Art Museum (2006), Rescue Archaeology, a project for the Museum of Modern Art (2004).

This lecture is being co-sponsored by Laumeier Sculpture Park, where Dion’s exhibition Mark Dion: Follies opens on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2020.

Pictured: Mark Dion, Neukom Vivarium, 2006, mixed media installation, greenhouse structure: Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle