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 Smart 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 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.