Floor 2
Tickets: $15 general admission, $10 member pricing
Mark Dion is an artist whose work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. In Dion’s practice, the lines between art and science are often blurred. On the opening of his exhibition, The Life of a Dead Tree, the artist is joined by Marc Mayer for a lively discussion that focuses on the intersections between art and science in relation to nature and how these considerations manifest in his exhibition at MOCA.
Biographies
Mark Dion has received numerous awards, including the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001), The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2007) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucida Art Award (2008). His work was included in dOCUMENTA 13 and he has had major exhibitions at museums including the Miami Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in London at Tate Modern and the Natural History Museum. In 2006, Neukom Vivarium, a permanent outdoor installation and learning lab for the Olympic Sculpture Park, was commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum.
Marc Mayer was Director and CEO of the National Gallery of Canada from 2009 to 2019. Formerly director of the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montreal, he was the Deputy Director for Art of the Brooklyn Museum after leading The Power Plant in Toronto from 1998 to 2001. Marc has organized such widely acclaimed exhibitions as Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, 2002, and the Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective of 2005, both for the Brooklyn Museum, and, with co-curator Sarah Stanners, the National Gallery of Canada’s 2014 Jack Bush retrospective. His most recent publications include Art in Canada, published on the occasion of the 2017 sesquicentennial of Canada’s confederation.
