Mary Miss

Mary Miss (born May 27, 1944)^[1] is an American environmental artist. Her work is site-specific, making reference to the history and ecology of the location.

Early life

Mary Miss (born May 27, 1944)^[1] in New York City, New York. Miss' childhood was spent on the west coast although she would later move back to live in New York City and create installations of the majority of her work. Her father was a career military officer, which kept the family moving from place to place often, therefore some of Miss's work relate to years of her being billeted in army barracks and forts.^[2]

Education

Miss studied art and received a BA from University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966. The art program she entered was a traditional program and it was during this program she realized art could be about expressing ideas and not just focus on the shapes or looks of the pieces.^[2] Miss later received an MFA from the Rhinehart School of Sculpture of Maryland Institute College of Art in 1968.^[2]

Personal life

Married Bruce Colvin , another sculptor, in 1967, later divorced in 1986.^[2]

Career

Miss is an American environmental artist. Her work is site-specific, making reference to the history and ecology of the location.

Mary Miss has teamed up with architects, ecologists, engineers, planners, and public administrators on projects varying vastly such as, developing a provisional memorial around the perimeter of Ground Zero, determining the expected flood level of Boulder, Colorado, exposing the history of the Union Square Subway station in New York City or even turning a sewage treatment plant into an interactive public space.^[3]

Design Philosophy

Mary Miss enjoys working on her own and her work is physically and visually integrated into the sites. She spends a lot of her time on the location of her installations, getting a feel for the atmosphere, the space, the domestic structures, while also photographing every angle of the space. Mary Miss's works are unified with the atmosphere and earth of the sites location, inspired by everyday environments. Henderson writes, "Miss has become a fiend for infrastructure, she strives to create a sense of place. She thinks of spaces/structures that allow people to be the connections between the open space and the dense areas of the city." ^[2]

Miss's work can be seen as playful surrealism. It oscillates with metaphors for protection, fortification, and measurement. "She does not so much as build an object as cancel, indicate, enclose, and obstruct space: her intent is to devise situations probing emotional and psychological effects that spaces have on people. The spectators become participants, walking around and through the installations, re-examining surroundings they had taken for granted." ^[2]

"Miss has come to realize that built structures are accessible to the public: viewers can recognize them, or, from the sum of their personal experiences, make sense of them."^[2]

In her career, Miss has expanded from transitory installations to larger scale transformations of previous groundwork.^[4]

Exhibitions

Miss was included in the exhibition "Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists," at the Aldrich Museum in 1971. Lucy Lippard was the curator, and other artists included Alice Aycock and Jackie Winsor.^[5]

Along with others, Miss's work has been included in the exhibitions: Decoys, Complexes and Triggers at the Sculpture Center in New York, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change organized by Lucy Lippard at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 70’s, Brandeis Museum’s Rose Art Museum, and Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern.^[3]

Miss has been the thesis of other exhibitions such as, Harvard University Art Museum, Brown University Gallery, The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Architectural Association in London, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and the Des Moines Art Center.^[3]

Public art

Battery Park City 8952

• Miss was part of the land art movement that developed in the United States in the 1960s. Her work, like her peers Nancy Holt and Alice Aycock, was architectural: it incorporated wood, metal, concrete and other materials on the site. When she began to work outdoors, she was interested in articulating the experience of an individual moving through a particular landscape.^[6] Miss's early works were temporary installations, such as Untitled (Battery Park) (1973), a series of wooden panels set at intervals on the uneven terrain, with round holes cut out to suggest a setting (or rising) sun.^[7][8]

• Miss's 1977–1978 Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn, New York was one of Rosalind Krauss's inspirations when she defined postmodern sculpture in her article, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field."^[9] The work includes three wooden towers (pavilions), a semicircular grass-covered mound, and an underground chamber (decoys). She was inspired by explorer Richard Francis Burton's account of visiting Mecca and al-Madinah.^[10]

• Miss's working process involves visiting the site and discovering significant elements of the natural and built environments. She also researches the history of a site, to identify significant events and local associations. In Field Rotation at Governor's State University in Park Forest South, IL, an array of wooden posts cut to the same height draw attention to the slightly rolling terrain, and evoke the telephone poles and fence posts of the Midwestern agricultural landscape.^[11]

Other works incorporated landscape design, such as South Cove, a permanent public site in lower Manhattan on the Hudson River completed in 1987. Designed with architect Stanton Eckstut and landscape architect Susan Child, the project extends over three acres and includes walkways, a bridge, and a viewing platform.^[12]

Battery Park City 8950

More recent work has emphasized Miss's commitment to environmental concerns, for example "FLOW: Can You See the River?" in Indianapolis, along the the White River, installed in 2011.^[13]

• "FLOW: Can You See the River?" was a long term public art project done by Mary Miss in 2011, commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, with concurrent activities facilitated by EcoArts Connections and more than 20 leading arts science, environment, and municipal organizations and agencies. The project was city wide and was meant to show the public how the White River water's health and future is affected by the everyday activities from the surrounding public. The intention of FLOW was to engage the citizens of Indianapolis and unify them with the history, ecology, origins, and potential of the White River.^[14] Using over 100 stainless steel round mirrors placed incrementally along side the 6 mile stretch of the White River, each mirror was a red ball attatched to little metal spikes. Each mirror has a red dot on it and if lined up with the reflection of the red ball, you create the intended ecological feature into the frame. At that same time, you bring yourself into the pictured environment.^[15]
• "Broadway: 1000 Steps" - While working on her earlier project, FLOW, Mary Miss had been speaking about her project at the New York Department of City Planning and the director, Amanda Burden suggested to Miss that she should do a project in New York. Miss was tempted so she began thinking about what she would createas part of her ongoing project "City as Living Laboratory: Sustainability Made Tangible Through the Arts." Miss found the corridor of Broadway would be an interesting focus because of how historically iconic it is in New York. Miss says, "it was a Native American trail to start with–it’s the ridgeline through a good deal of the city where the water runs off in opposite directions on either side." ^[4]
• Sarah Cascone writes in her article, "Mary Miss Walks Broadway," "The goal for "Broadway: 1000 Steps" is to create a series of hub sites where Miss will introduce markers on the urban landscape to indicate important elements of interaction between the city and nature that normally escape residents' notice. By placing convex mirrors at specific locations, Miss will call attention to details that appear alongside the viewer's reflection, and invite the viewer to make a phone call to learn more.^[16] The idea for Broadway was to create a space where artists could implement new ideas about the city that people can come see. Miss says, "whether it was some way of making composting interesting to people, or a new kind of park, or showing where urban farming could happen along the way." And later, "I thought if artists, over a period of time, could incrementally work on this corridor, people could begin to see the city not just as the home of Wall Street, not just a 19th or 20th century place, but really a city that’s looking to the future. I also thought it would really be an interesting way to get the initiatives of the city’s PlaNYC down at the street level so that people could have access and begin to understand issues that were being talked about between city departments."^[4]
• Miss ends with, "To come back to Broadway, I consider my project to be the initiation of something ongoing. And that people would be engaged at each of the sites. We’re working really hard to contact community groups and different organizations — whether it’s the community board, or a youth market — whoever is around in each particular hub [on the route]. We’re trying to get these groups interested and engaged and we would hope that there would be a way of sustaining an ongoing conversation between them about possibilities of future projects. Is there a possibility to do an urban farm on roofs in your neighborhood? Is there a possibility of doing some other kind of green infrastructure? We’re trying to start a chain reaction on Broadway — one that will turn it into the identifiably ‘green corridor’ where people can go to see the city remaking itself."^[4]

Awards

Miss received the New York City American Society of Landscape Architects President's Award in 2010, the American Academy in Rome's Centennial Medal in 2001, and a Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects in 1990. She received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1986. She was awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984, 1975, and 1974.^[17]

• Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) grants
• New York State Council on the Arts (1973, 1976)
• National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants (1974, 1975, 1984)
• Brandeis University Creative Arts award (1982)
• Guggenheim fellowship (1986)
• Medal of Honor, American Institute of Architects (1990)
• Philip N. Winslow Landscape Design Award, Parks Council, NYC (1992)
• Urban Design award (in collaboration with Studio Works), Progressive Architecture Magazine (1992)

Further reading

• Kingsley, April. "Six Women at Work in a Landscape." Arts Magazine 52 (April 1978): 108-12
• Lippard, Lucy. "Mary Miss: An Extremely Clear Situation." Art in America 62 (March–April 1974): 76-7
• Marter, Joan M. "Collaborations: Artists and Architects on Public Sites." Art Journal 48 (1989): 315-20
• Miss, Mary. "On a Redefinition of Public Sculpture." Perspecta, no. 21 (1984): 52-69

References