Mark Dion wins the Lucelia Artist Award September 26, 2008

Mark Dion, Neukom Vivarium, 2004-2006, mixed-media installation, Seattle Art Museum. Photo by Paul Macapia, 2007, courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Dion placed a log within a greenhouse where visitors are encouraged to study the funguses, insects, and other life that comes from its natural decay.

Mark Dion has been chosen as the 2008 winner of the Lucelia Artist Award, given annually by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to an artist younger than 50 who has shown outstanding creativity through an exceptional body of work. Dion, who lives and works in Pennsylvania, creates elaborate mixed-media installations, sculptures, and public projects that explore the relationship between art, science, and history. He is the eighth recipient of the award and was chosen by a jury of five, who selected him from fifteen nominees.

The five jurors who selected Dion are Mark Bessire, director of the Bates College Museum of Art; Allan McCollum, artist and senior critic in sculpture at Yale University School of Art; Nancy Princenthal, senior editor of Art in America magazine; John Ravenal, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, director and chief curator at the Aspen Art Museum.

Eye Level will be catching up with this provocative artist in the next few weeks, but in the meantime, I want to share some of his comments made during a PBS interview: I think the job of an artist is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception, prejudice, and convention. A big flaw in some public art schemes is that they seem to be about trying to find an artist who’s going to please everyone. That’s not interesting to me. I think it’s really important that artists have an agitational function in culture. No one else seems to.

“The Lucelia Artist Award acknowledges Mark Dion’s tireless imagination and ongoing achievement as an artist and educator,” the jurors wrote in their decision. “His archeological digs and museum interventions celebrate the value of exploration and learning, and invite audiences to embark on their own journey of intellectual discovery. This approach, coupled with a prodigious commitment to visual creativity, has inspired a generation of artists and established Dion as one of the most innovative contemporary artists working today.”

The other nominees for this year's award were Doug Aitken, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Slater Bradley, Matthew Buckingham, Keith Edmier, Spencer Finch, Harrell Fletcher, Mark Grotjahn, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Rachel Harrison, Zoe Leonard, Suzanne McClelland, Wangechi Mutu and Dana Schutz.

In addition to the award, Dion will receive a $25,000 prize intended to encourage his future development and experimentation. Dion joins the ranks of the seven previous winners of the Lucelia: Jessica Stockholder (2007); Matthew Coolidge, director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (2006); Andrea Zittel (2005); Kara Walker (2004); Rirkrit Tiravanija (2003); Liz Larner (2002); and Jorge Pardo (2001).

• Mark Dion, Lucelia Award, American Art,
  Smithsonian American Art Museum