Born in 1961, New Bedford, Massachusetts, US
Lives and works in New York, US
Mark Dion is an American artist who metamorphoses into an explorer, biochemist, detective and archeologist.
In his gallery installations around Europe and America since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments and museum caches of the great historical naturalists, following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco-inspired journeys to the tropics.
His research and magical collections are presented in installational still lifes which combine taxidermic animals with lab equipment with artefacts, like walk-through Wunderkammers, life-sized cabinets of curiosity.
He received a BFA and an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford School of Art, Connecticut in 1986 and 2003, respectively. He also studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1982-84, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program from 1984-85. He has received numerous awards, including the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucida Art Award (2008).
Throughout the past two decades, his work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide. Notable solo exhibitions include The Perilous Texas Adventures of Mark Dion, The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2020), Mark Dion: Our Plundered Planet, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Irlande (2019), Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World, Whitechapel Gallery Londres (2018), Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (2017), The Curator's Office, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis (2013), The Macabre Treasury at Museum Het Domein in Sittard, The Netherlands, (2012), Oceanomania: Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas at Musée Océanographique de Monaco and Nouveau Musée National de Monaco / Villa Paloma in Monaco (2011), The Marvelous Museum: A Mark Dion Project at Oakland Museum of California (2010-11), Systema Metropolis at Natural History Museum, London (2007), The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit at Miami Art Museum (2006), Rescue Archaeology, a project for the Museum of Modern Art (2004), and his renowned Tate Thames Dig at the Tate Gallery in London (1999).
In 2012, his work was included in dOCUMENTA 13, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in Kassel, Germany, and has also been exhibited at MoMA PS1 in New York, Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Remagen, Germany, and Kunsthaus Graz in Austria.