Mildred's Lane and The Mildred Complex(ity)

TOWN Friday, July 6, 2018
Free and open to the public!
6:00 pm gathering at The Mildred Complex(ity)
6:30 pm at The Delaware Valley Arts Alliance Krauss Recital Hall!

Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett
Mildred's Lane: Past, Present, and Future

Mark Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge and the natural world. The job of the artist, he says, is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention. For over two decades Dion has worked in the public realm in a wide range of scales, from architecture projects to print interventions in newspapers. Some of his most recent large-scale public project include "The Amateur Ornithologist Clubhouse" a Captain Nemo-like interior constructed in a vast gas tank in Essen, Germany, and "Den" a large scale folly in Norway's mountainous landscape which feature a massive sculpture of a sleeping bear in a cave, resting on a hill of material culture from the Neolithic to the present. Dion has also produced large-scale permanent commissions for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, the Montevideo Biannale in Uruguay, The Rose Art Museum, Johns Hopkins University and the Port of Los Angeles.

Dion was born in 1961 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Dion initially studied in 1981-2 at the Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford in Connecticut, which awarded him a BFA (1986) and an honorary doctorate in 2002. From 1983 to 1984 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 has received numerous awards, including the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001) The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2007) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucida Art Award (2008). He has had major exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum, Miami (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004); Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2003); Tate Gallery, London (1999), and the British Museum of Natural History, London (2007). “Neukom Vivarium” (2006), a permanent outdoor installation and learning lab for the Olympic Sculpture Park, was commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum. Dion produced a major permanent commission, ‘OCEANOMANIA: Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas’ for the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco. In 2016 Dion and his curatorial collaborator Sarina Basta produced the large-scale exhibition, ExtraNaturel: Voyage initiatique dans la collection des Beaux-Arts de Paris, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

J. Morgan Puett is a trans-disciplinary, creative producer innovative in the realm of social engagement. Her projects continue to forge new ground, citing that being is profoundly a social and political practice. Puett's accomplishments are in areas of installation art, clothing and furniture design, architecture, film, writing and more – rearranging these intersections – applying conceptual tools of contemporary theory, research and practice.  Her interests and projects range in history, biology, new economies, design, craft, and most importantly – collaboration. Morgan’s early work forged new territory by intervening into the fashion system with a series of storefront installations and clothing/dwelling projects in Manhattan in the eighties and nineties; then produced a long series of research installations in museums around the world about the histories of needle trade systems.
 
J. Morgan Puett was born in Hahira, Georgia in 1957. She received her BFA in painting and sculpture (1981), and MFA in sculpture and experimental filmmaking in (1984); both from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Puett has received the PEW Charitable Trust in Philadelphia (2005), the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2005), the Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship (2009), the United States Artists Simon Fellow Award (2011),  The John and Marva Warnock Award (2014). Most recently, Puett has received honors including The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award and The Pollock- Krasner Foundation Award, both in (2016). Puett has created major exhibitions worldwide; at the Serpentine Gallery/Victoria and Albert Museum (2001), Spoleto USA Charleston (2002), Bronx's Wave Hill NYC (2002), Mass MoCA (2004), Sullivan Galleries in Chicago (2008 & 2014), The Queens Museum NYC (2010), Museum of Modern Art NYC (MoMA 2012), 1st Tbilisi Triennial Contemporary Art Center of Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia (2012), DOX Prague (2013), and has been curating collaborative projects at Mildred's Lane for the past decade.

Puett's Storefront practices include public spaces of Mildred's Lane; The Mildred Complex(ity)  in nearby Narrowsburg, and a Guide to the Field opening in Mountaindale, NY this coming autumn 2018. Puett currently is living, working, learning and teaching in Pennsylvania at Mildred’s Lane which she co-directs with Mark Dion. 

We would like to thank The Delaware Valley Arts Alliance for partnering with us in TOWN Fridays by sharing the Krauss Recital Hall upstairs!