Ecologies

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavour 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 catalogue documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum associate 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 comprised the exhibition.