Patricia Johanson's
Biography
Patricia Johanson grew up in New York City and the Long Island suburbs,
although Olmsted parks and summers in the Catskill Mountains remain her most
indelible memory.
She attended Saturday classes at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, and in 1958
entered Bennington College in Vermont to study art and music. Non-resident
terms were devoted to painting at the Art Students' League, working as an
assistant to Frederick Keisler, architect of the "Endless House" and "Shrine
for the Dead Sea Scrolls", and organizing Surrealist artist, Joseph Cornellās
collection of plastic doll parts (legs, arms, heads, and torsos), and his
poetic and pornographic clippings.
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Johanson's "Color Room" at Bennington College (1959), a walk-through
sculptural environment of colors and forms, was visited by David Smith and
Ken Noland, and she also developed friendships with such art world luminaries
as Helen Frankenthaler and Barnett Newman prior to graduating in 1962. After
Bennington, Johanson earned an M.A. in art history at Hunter College (1964)
while painting and haunting art galleries and museums. During this period
she supported herself by doing art research for publishers, including a
300-page unpublished manuscript, "Art and Artists in America: 1835-1885", the
genesis for her interest in nineteenth century painters, photographers, and
naturalists.
Johanson's paintings of the early 1960's were in a style that later became
known as Minimalism. Reducing forms and colors to their simplest essence was
being explored by a number of artists, and her first professional exhibition
came in 1964: "8 Young Artists" at the Hudson River Museum, now considered
the first show of "Minimal Art".
She was also inspired by the monumentality of the enormous canvases of the
Abstract Expressionists, and began to explore placing colors and forms in
actual physical space. A series of paintings from 1966 and 1967, each 28
feet long, were deceptively simple, but perceptually complex, because they
could not be seen in a single view, and transformed with the movement of the
spectator. One of these paintings was exhibited in her first one-person show
in New York at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery (1967), and another in the Museum of
Modern Art's "Art of the Real" exhibition, toured to the Grand Palais, Paris,
Tate Gallery, London, and Kunsthalle, Zurich.
Related sculptures, such as the 1600-foot "Stephen Long" (1968) literally
went beyond the field of vision, and began to interact with their outdoor
settings. The simple red, yellow, and blue primary colors were transformed
at sunset, when red light magically changed the yellow stripe to orange, and
the blue stripe to violet.
Around 1964 Johanson met Georgia O'Keeffe, a grandmotherly figure almost
totally unknown to the younger generation. By manipulating subject matter,
O'Keeffe's often tiny paintings appeared enormous, but she was now interested
in the contemporary sense of scale'especially the recent phenomenon of
physically vast canvases with minimal forms. She invited Johanson to return
with her to Abiquiu to organize her photographs and clippings, and help
catalogue her paintings. By 1966, the year of O'Keeffe's retrospective at
the Amon Carter Museum, Johanson had provided her with the encouragement and
technical support for O'Keeffe to produce "Above the Clouds". Conversely,
during long walks and talks at Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, O'Keeffe had become
Johanson's mentor, transmitting vital information on how to survive as a
woman artist.
In 1969 Johanson was commissioned by HOUSE AND GARDEN to design "artist's
gardens" for the magazine. Most of the proposed projects, presented as small
drawings, were large-scale sculptural solutions to environmental problems,
such as erosion, sedimentation, water conservation, flooding, sewage
treatment, landfills, and habitat loss. The series of 150 drawings contained
the seeds for such later movements as "functional", "public", and
"ecological" art.
The following year a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed Johanson to realize work
on a grand scale, and also explore the relationship between sculpture and
various natural settings. The materials of "Cyrus Field", marble, redwood,
and cement block, are each related to the colors and textures of changing
ecologies, and multiple patterns are experienced as one explores this linear
sculpture that extends for miles through the forest.
In 1972 the architect Romaldo Giurgola (Mitchell/Giurgola Associates) invited
Johanson to design sculpture for three major projects: Con Edison's Indian
Point Nuclear Generating Plant, the Whitney Colleges at Yale University, and
Columbus East High School, Columbus, Indiana. The scale of these works
appealed to her, as well as the fact that they brought art into the center of
everyday life. Two sculptures for the Con Edison Visitors' Center, each a
mile long, functioned as continuous access road, paths, stairways, benches,
terraces, bridge, overlook, and seating. Pavement designs for Yale
University were enormous bas-reliefs that would have appeared abstract from
the ground, but visible as animals and inscriptions from the top of the
building.
In 1973 Johanson married the art critic E.C. Goossen, gave birth to her first
child, and moved to rural upstate New York. Throughout the 1970's she
continued to exhibit in art galleries and museums, and in 1974 she was
Visiting Artist at Oberlin College, M.I.T., and Alfred University,
alternately teaching classes and nursing the baby.
Although she remained isolated from the New York art world, Johanson was
determined to continue her career. Despite the continuous exhaustion that
comes with motherhood, she forced herself to make tiny sketches of plants and
other natural structures encountered during the day. Then at night she would
try to imagine how they could be translated into large-scale projects. Three
kinds of smaller, more "domestic" work were produced during this period.
Paintings and drawings became plans for public landscapes; topographical
ceramic sculptures were models for projects she hoped would be built; and
rock gardens, such as "Nostoc II" at Storm King Art Center (1975) interwove
biological structures with the natural world. Johanson also attended City
College School of Architecture at night (B. Arch, 1977) in order to obtain
the engineering and construction knowledge needed to realize such ambitious
projects.
In 1978 Johanson returned to New York with the first of four one-person
exhibits at the Rosa Esman Gallery. Her second and third sons were born in
1978 and 1980, and she also received a second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980.
Somehow an equation had to be found that would make art and children
mutually-enhancing benefits, and the answer lay in removing art from its
rarefied setting, and taking it out into the streets.
When Harry Parker, Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, saw Johanson's
"Plant Drawings for Projects" exhibit, he immediately called and offered a
very open-ended commission to re-design "Dallas' old mud hole". There was no
program and no budget. In Parker's words: "Do what you think should be done.
This is Dallas. If they like it, they'll build it!"
Fair Park Lagoon, begun in 1981, took five years to complete and serves many
different aesthetic, educational, functional and environmental purposes.
Sculptural elements control shoreline erosion, create microhabitats for
wildlife, and enhance public access with paths, bridges, islands, and
seating. Living ecosystems are restored by enlarging and balancing the food
chain, plantings provide wildlife food and habitat, and the lagoon itself
acts as a flood basin. The sculptures, set within a swamp, are enormously
popular and are often cited as models for successful public art.
Equally ambitious unbuilt projects include a "Tidal Sculpture Garden" for
Pelham Bay Park in New York (1984); Cathedral Square, Sacramento (1984); and
a park with a lake and wildlife habitat for the roof of a parking garage in
downtown Los Angeles (1986).
In 1987 Johanson was commissioned to design a new sewer along San Francisco
Bay as a work of art. By burying the sewer below ground, its roof became a
public baywalk, thirty feet wide and one-third of a mile long, with tidal
sculpture, butterfly meadow, endangered species habitat; public amenities
(arbor, pavilion, seating, overlook), and restored shellfish substrate-- all
incorporated into the image of the endangered San Francisco Garter Snake.
Shortly thereafter, Johanson was diagnosed with "terminal" cancer, and spent
the next two years in treatment, while seeking to intuitively understand the
true meaning and possible solutions to the disease process. She writes: "I
continued to think about art and make drawings for projects during the years
when survival was my primary concern, and the first work I created after
recovery was a series of plans for "Survival Sculptures" (1990). I wanted to
use art to literally save lives by employing forms in meaningful, purposeful
ways."
One set of plans for "Survival Sculptures" is being built in Nairobi, where
polluted water kills many children each year (Nairobi River Park, 1995).
Meandering, bas-relief forms' snake, snail, bird, insect, human hand are
filled with wetland plants and will purify water as it flows through the
sculpture. Another group of "Survival Sculptures", "Vernal Pools", are
shallow, sculptural depressions, filled with edible landscaping for wildlife,
and serve as breeding grounds for amphibians which are threatened worldwide.
Following her illness, Johanson began disseminating her healing vision with
renewed vigor and beyond the confines of art. A delegate to the "Survival
and the Arts Conference" at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute (1991) and
the Global Forum General Assembly in Kyoto, and installation of Mikhail
Gorbachev as President of the International Green Cross (1993), Johanson was
also invited to attend the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
"Park for the Amazon Rainforest", commissioned for the Earth Summit, is an
environmental sculpture that provides access from ground level through the
bird, butterfly, and flower-filled upper canopy by means of ramps, seating,
and viewing platforms interwoven with the forest. The park combines
biological preservation and scientific research with daring engineering and
ecotourism in an area that is currently being rapidly destroyed. In 1997 the
Brazilian government donated a site for the park along the Amazon River near
Obidos.
Johanson's recent projects include a master plan and ecological playgrounds
for "Ulsan Dragon Park" (1996), a 912-acre site in South Korea's most
populous industrial city, and "The Rocky Marciano Trail" in Brockton,
Massachusetts.