27 Facts About Patricia Johanson

Patricia Johanson designed her functional art projects, created with and in the natural landscape, to solve infrastructure and environmental problems, but to reconnect city-dwellers with nature and with the history of a place.

Patricia Johanson grew up in New York City, where enjoyed spending time in Central Park and Prospect Park, as well as in the city's art museums.

Patricia Johanson's Bennington instructor, Tony Smith, was a close friend and her art history professor, Eugene Goossen, was a mentor and later became her husband.

Patricia Johanson came to know art critic Clement Greenberg and visionary architect Frederick John Kiesler.

Patricia Johanson earned a Master's in art history at Hunter College, New York in 1964.

Patricia Johanson began making large-scale, Minimal sculpture in 1966 with William Rush, consisting of 200 feet of painted steel tee-beams laid flat in a clearing.

Patricia Johanson invented a way to mediate between human scale and the vastness of nature.

Patricia Johanson gave up painting and sculpture and focused on designs that are simultaneously art and landscape.

Patricia Johanson left the vibrant New York art scene for a 19th-century farmhouse on the rural Buskirk property of Eugene Goossen.

Patricia Johanson's first son, Alvar, was born in 1973.

Patricia Johanson's solution was to make tiny drawings of plants during the day and at night to transform them into designs for large-scale projects.

Patricia Johanson's first built project was commissioned in 1981 to restore Fair Park's Leonhardt Lagoon, which was then in a badly degraded state.

The Patricia Johanson Foundation, dedicated to promoting greater public interest in the artist's legacy, public design, ecological art, and multi-functional infrastructure, was established in 2023.

When San Francisco needed a new pump station and holding tank next to the Bay, Patricia Johanson was invited to co-design a facility that would be sensitive to the site.

Patricia Johanson wanted something aesthetic, but useful in ways beyond mere sewage treatment, so she designed a series of habitats to nourish threatened species.

In 1992, the Brazilian government invited Patricia Johanson to attend the Earth Summit and to create a project for a park in the Amazon Rainforest.

Patricia Johanson developed a master plan to connect disparate neighborhoods and districts and to restore ecological functioning.

Patricia Johanson planned to daylight the many buried or disrupted streams throughout the town and to revive forest corridors to create a continuous public landscape.

In 1999, Patricia Johanson was part of an international team of experts asked to propose sustainable solutions for Seoul's main dumpsite, which closed in 1990.

Patricia Johanson borrowed decorative patterns of haetae sculptures to create designs for terraces, microhabitats, and pedestrian and vehicle access to the summits.

Patricia Johanson's design has been credited with "re-inventing art and reforming civil engineering".

Patricia Johanson used the form of the endangered Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse to create the shapes of the polishing ponds, which contain islands that direct the flow of water and provide nesting habitat for birds.

The Salt Lake nonprofit, Parley's Rails, Trails and Tunnels Coalition commissioned Patricia Johanson to create safe passage under a major expressway and connect two sections of the planned eight-mile Parley's Trail.

Patricia Johanson married art critic and historian Eugene Goossen in 1974.

Patricia Johanson had three sons: Gerrit, Alvar, and Nathaniel, and three grandchildren.

Patricia Johanson died from heart failure on October 16,2024, at the age of 84.

Patricia Johanson's work has been showcased in over 150 exhibitions, and her models are included in the permanent collections of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.