Mark Dion

"Turning Nature into Art"

(1961 - Present)

Mark Dion, a renowned and award winning artist and sculptor with major exhibitions and installations across the US and Europe, spent his childhood in Fairhaven and graduated from Fairhaven High School in 1981. During the next six years, he studied at the University of Hartford, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. His works, made up of elaborately arranged collections of found natural and human-made objects, show how our ideas of history, knowledge and nature are shaped by societal and institutional belief systems. He has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Falmouth University in the UK. In 2017, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston hosted “Mark Dion: Misadventures of a Twenty First Century Naturalist”, the largest American survey to date of the Dion’s work. He lives in New York with his wife, artist Dana Sherwood, and their son.