Joe Mangrum (Born February 10, 1969) is an installation and multiple-medium artist. He currently resides in New York City. Born and raised in Florissant, Missouri, he later attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1991. His focus of study was on painting and photography, though after art school he began to expand his work into site-specific, environmental and often ephemeral installations. Using a wide spectrum of components, his work often includes organic materials, such as flowers, food and sand, in addition to deconstructed computer parts, auto-parts and a multitude of found and collected objects. His installations often include mandala forms, pyramids, maps, grids and mushroom clouds.
Joe Mangrum was born on February 10, 1969, in Florissant, Missouri, near St. Louis. At age 16, he won a trip to India, in an art competition, sponsored by the Asia Society, called "Portraits of India". His entry in the contest was a painting which portrayed a series of baskets, representing his limited knowledge of India. A few were opened with textiles, but the majority were still closed with lids, waiting for his discovery. That trip marked his first encounter with air travel and the beginning of his interest in glob-trotting. After attending The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, he traveled for over four years in Europe and throughout the U.S.A. His travels led to innovative ways of supporting this passion for adventure, such as hair-wrapping and jewelry-making, thereby exposing him to a wide range of people and places. For the few years that followed, he worked as an artist and vendor in the wake of such music tours as Lollapalooza and the Grateful Dead. Eventually he landed in Laguna Beach, California and began to arrange mandala forms in public spaces out of flowers and seashells.
Mangrum's first installations in Laguna Beach, stemmed from a desire to draw attention to the impending San Joaquin Hills Toll Road, in 1994. The road, would divide one of the last major open green spaces in Orange County, California. His newly found activism propelled his determination to examine environmental issues in the forum of public art. Joe Mangrum began to create mandala forms of found flora and organic materials at Main Beach Park, a public space in Laguna Beach. His installation was swept up by the Parks Department after two days, so he continued to create new mandalas for the following two weeks, only to have them swept up again. After visiting a city-council meeting to inquire why his installation was continually swept up, the council demanded that he provide one million dollars worth of liability insurance and move his installation to a different site in the park. The story was picked up by the L.A. Times [1] and thereby sparked a further discussion about art, its expression and the right to protest.
A second L.A. Times story [2] caught the eye of then art gallery owner Daniel Arvizu, whom invited Mangrum to create an installation at his gallery in Southern California. He installed a piece inspired by Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" made of molasses (as a substitute for oil) and orange slices in an interpretation of observations of life in Orange County. Continuing onto San Francisco, Joe Mangrum took up residence there, permanently, after many years of traveling and added to his repertoire of public art both spontaneously and two commissioned projects by the city of San Francisco. One of the commissioned works is permanent and can be found on opposite corners of the bus stops of Mission and 22nd streets in San Francisco [3]. He was invited to work in indoor spaces, in addition to his site-specific outdoor installations.
Joe Mangrum attended the Florence Biennale in December, 2003, where he was awarded the prestigious Lorenzo de Medici award, in New Media for his installation, entitled "Fragile". The piece consisted of a glass pyramid and gold-leafed bricks with representations of many of the world's commodities, and chess pieces, on a fragile, hierarchical pyramid. A mandala of food is juxtaposed on the ground, as well as a terra-cotta grid below the pyramid. These are forms which often appear in Mangrum's installations.
In 2005, in celebration for World Environment Day held in San Francisco, California, Mangrum created a 40 ft tall and 16 ft wide Mushroom Cloud of live wheatgrass.[4] The project was grown over a 2 week period in various locations in San Francisco and contained 300 lbs of dry wheatgrass seed. The cloud towered over an artificial cityscape made from industrial parts. The title of the project was "Detonation Earth" and was installed at Red Ink Studios in San Francisco.[5]
Mangrum has created installations since 1994 and is currently working on a book that documents this history.