Universal Collection: A Mark Dion Project

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Universal Collection: A Mark Dion Project

May 26 - December 11, 2016

Artist Mark Dion is renowned for his "cabinets of curiosities" that incorporate found objects from richly diverse sources. During a semester as an artist-in-residence at Vassar College, Dion co-taught a course and worked with students to create such a cabinet with objects curated from various collections at Vassar. The result is the site-specific installation Universal Collection: A Mark Dion Project. (right: Universal Collection: A Mark Dion Project, 2016 (installation view), Mixed-media site-specific installation. Painting on top right wall: Laura Battle, How long is your past, how far is your future, 2015, oil and mixed media on canvas. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Chip Porter, courtesy of Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College)

Universal Collection will be on view in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center through December 11, 2016. The installation features a monumental (twenty-three feet tall) cabinet which houses hundreds of objects pulled from all corners of Vassar's campus and history. The objects come from the collections of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, the A. Scott Warthin Museum of Geology & Natural History, Special Collections, Athletics, the Music Department, Drama Department, Biology Department, and the Vassar College Artifacts Project. Some highlights include: nineteenth-century scientific instruments, paintings, botanical specimens, athletic equipment, taxidermy, sculpture, geological specimens, and Vassar memorabilia such as student handbooks and class rings.

"Dion spent countless hours digging through the campus's disparate collections and archives, even exploring basements, to select objects for inclusion, " says Mary-Kay Lombino, the Emily Hargroves Fisher '57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator and Assistant Director for Strategic Planning at the Art Center. "The resulting installation offers an arresting visual array that will at once seduce and challenge viewers. His work challenges our assumptions of how things are meant to be selected, categorized, and displayed in a museum setting."

For example, a well-worn field hockey stick hangs beside a Picasso still-life, a former dance student's old ballet shoes hang near a fossil of a fish and an Indian oil painting on glass, and a Wedgwood vase is seen together with a contemporary ceramic pot made on a Native American reservation. These types of juxtapositions and many more begin to address the politics of display and upend traditional museum classification as well as visitor expectations.

Universal Collection is generously supported by the Creative Arts Across Disciplines initiative of Vassar College, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation; and the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center Exhibition Fund. Additional support provided by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and by The Helen Forster Novy 1928 Fund.

Exhibition Events

Gallery Talk, Tuesday, June 7, 2016, 4:00pm

Elizabeth Nogrady, coordinator of academic programs at the Art Center, discussed the processes by which internationally renowned artist Mark Dion worked with students and faculty on the Vassar campus to create this thought-provoking installation.

About Creative Arts Across Disciplines (CAAD)

In 2014, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Vassar College a grant for this multi-year initiative to enhance integration of the creative arts across the college curriculum. CAAD utilizes artist residencies, thematic programming, faculty and curricular development initiatives and student creative projects to broaden collaboration across academic disciplines. Each academic year, CAAD has focused on one of the five senses. The theme for the 2015-16 year is hearing.

About Mark Dion

Based in New York and working internationally, Dion's art investigates the role of public institutions in shaping our understanding of nature, history, and the boundaries between scientific methods and subjective experience. Recent solo exhibitions of Dion's work have been held at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Dresden; Musée Océanographique de Monaco; and Tate Gallery, London. Dion also works regularly within higher education, having completed projects at Johns Hopkins, Brown University, Columbia, and the University of Virginia.

(above: Universal Collection: A Mark Dion Project, 2016 (detail), Mixed-media site-specific installation. Photo by Chip Porter, courtesy of Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College)

As of June, 2016, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center website says this about the installation:

In spring 2016, the Art Center will host Mark Dion as Vassar artist-in-residence. Dion is a New York and Pennsylvania-based visual artist known for his "cabinets of curiosities" that incorporate found objects into site-specific installations. Dion will co-teach a course with anthropology professor Anne Pike-Tay, culminating in a work comprised of items drawn from the collections of the Art Center, Special Collections, and Vassar College Artifacts Project. This wealth of resources includes materials as diverse as nineteenth-century scientific instruments, Native American objects, Vassariana, examples of taxidermy, sculpture, geological specimens, and antique books. Dion writes, "For me it is always a personal pleasure treasure hunting for projects. Certainly we will uncover things never suspected.

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Mark Dion is the subject of a 2007 documentary on the PBS series, art:21. PBS says about Mark Dion as of June, 2016:

Mark Dion was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1961. He received a BFA (1986) and an honorary doctorate (2003) from the University of Hartford, School of Art, Connecticut. 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." Appropriating archaeological 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. The artist's spectacular and often fantastical curiosity cabinets, modeled on Wunderkabinetts of the sixteenth century, exalt atypical orderings of objects and specimens. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Mark Dion questions the authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society....

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