24 Facts About Mark Dion

Mark Dion was born on August 28,1961 and is an American conceptual artist best known for his use of scientific presentations in his installations.

Mark Dion was born on August 28,1961, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to a working-class family.

Mark Dion spent his early childhood in New Bedford before relocating to Fairhaven, Massachusetts, where he was mostly raised.

Mark Dion began attending the University of Hartford School of Art in 1981.

Mark Dion concurrently took classes at the School of Visual arts in New York from 1983 till 1984 and later participated at the one-year Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he studied with conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth and Hans Hacke, and media artist Barbara Kruger.

Mark Dion took classes in biology at City College and attended several reading seminars to develop a solid foundation in science.

Mark Dion worked with fellow students Gregg Bourdowitz, Jason Simon, Craig Owens.

Mark Dion experienced financial issues while attending school, leading him to work thirty hours a week as an art conservator in SoHo, Manhattan that specialized in nineteenth century American art.

Mark Dion received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Hartford School of Art in 1986.

Mark Dion worked on several small projects like The Department of Marine Animal identification of the City of New York, which gave way to his big collaborations with the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University and the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota.

Once collected and processed Mark Dion created an artwork from the objects and artefacts.

In 2001, assisted by students at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, Mark Dion conducted excavations in a garbage heap on the edge of Seekonk River, a burned-down 19th century waterfront site along the Narragansett Bay, in New Bedford, and a dump alongside the edge of a cemetery in Brockton, Massachusetts.

The group along with Mark Dion unearthed and collected a plethora of items and contemporary artifacts, all of which were cleaned, categorized and complied into an exhibition named the New England Digs.

In 2001, Mark Dion collaborated with some few students from the University of Minnesota and Colleen.

Mark Dion's findings included historical artifacts such as cornices, moldings, shards of ceramic and glass, sections of fireplace mantels, wallpaper pieces, and bricks from distinct phases of the Museum's expansion, as well as more recent ephemera, including the remains of Bruce Nauman's Audio-Visual Underground Chamber, which had been installed in the garden as part of the artist's 1995 retrospective.

Mark Dion utilized a 60-foot fallen Western Hemlock tree as the nurse log inside an 80-foot -long greenhouse.

In 2006, Mark Dion conducted a large installation at the South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit that focused on the Everglades and human attempts to control the South Florida ecosystem.

In 2015, Mark Dion completed his permanent installation, The Undisciplined Collector, in a small ground-floor gallery inside the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

In 2012, Mark Dion's work was included in dOCUMENTA 13, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in Kassel, Germany, and has been exhibited at MoMA PS1 in New York, Guggenheim Bilbao, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Tate Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Mark Dion continues to make frequent collaborations with museums of natural history, aquariums, zoos and other institutions mandated to produce public knowledge on the topic of nature.

Mark Dion is the subject of a monograph published by Phaidon, and a documentary episode of the PBS series Art:21.

In 2015, Mark Dion visited Colgate University to conduct workshops and lectures with students and faculty.

Mark Dion received the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award, The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucida Art Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Mark Dion has received several Honorary degrees, including an honorary doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Hartford in 2003, an Honorary Fellowship of the Falmouth University and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia.