Patricia Johanson Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

An Interview with Patricia Johanson https://archive.today/20130131021037/http://patriciajohanson.com/ahninterview/

Sue Spaid, A Field Guide to Patricia Johanson’s Works, Baltimore, Md, Contemporary Museum, 2012

Lamar Clarkson, “Earth Works,” ARTNews, June, 2008

Women Environmental Artists Directory: Biography https://web.archive.org/web/20081011091528/http://www.weadartists.org/johanson/johanson.html

Stephen Bann, “Preface” in Xin Wu, Patricia Johanson’s House & Garden Commission: Reconstruction of Modernity, vols. 1 & 2. Washington D. C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2007. http://sites.google.com/site/xinwuxin/publications/books

Michel Conan, “Introduction: In Defiance of the Institutional Art World” in Contemporary Garden Aesthetics, Creations and Interpretations, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2007

Xin Wu, Patricia Johanson’s House & Garden Commission: Reconstruction of Modernity, vols. 1 & 2. Washington, D. C.: Dumbarton Oaks / distributed by Harvard University Press, 2007. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WUPATR.html

Xin Wu, “Walk through the Crossing: The Draw at Sugar House Park, Salt Lake City” in Michel Conan ed, Contemporary Garden Aesthetics, Creations and Interpretations, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks / distributed by Harvard University Press, 2007

Xin Wu, Patricia Johanson’s House & Garden Commission: Reconstruction of Modernity, vols. 1 & 2 (Dumbarton Oaks / Harvard University Press, 2007). http://sites.google.com/site/xinwuxin/publications/books

Caffyn Kelley, Art and Survival. Patricia Johanson’s Environmental Projects, Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada: Islands Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2006

Lucy R. Lippard, “Panorama” in Caffyn Kelley, Art and Survival. Patricia Johanson’s Environmental Projects, Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada: Islands Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2006

The Draw began in 2003 as an award-winning design for a safe bicycle and pedestrian passage under a busy seven-lane highway. The underpass also connects two sections of Parley’s Creek Trail in Sugar House Park and the Hidden Hollow natural area. The original design evolved over the next 15 years in significant ways, notably in the augmentation of its flood-control functions and the elimination of two significant features of the original plan.

Patricia Johanson, “Fecund Landscapes: Art and Process in Public Parks,” Landscape & Art, no. 29, Summer, 2003, pp. 28–29, online at http://www.landviews.org/la2003/fecund-pj.html)

2003 AHN Award Winner: Patricia Johanson https://web.archive.org/web/20080517155424/http://www.artheals.org/ahn_award/2003ahn_award.html

Carlo Rotella, Good with their Hands, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002

Sue Spaid, Ecovention. Current Art to Transform Ecologies, Cincinnati, OH: The Contemporary Arts Center, ecoartspace, and greenmuseum.org, 2002

Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists, Da Capo Press, 2000 (originally published New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1979

In 1999, Johanson was part of an international team of experts asked to propose sustainable solutions for Seoul’s main dumpsite, which closed in 1990. To reclaim the site her idea was to transform it into a park and to restore ecological communities. As a unifying image, she chose the haetae, a mythical animal that wards off evil. She borrowed decorative patterns of haetae sculptures to create designs for terraces, microhabitats, and pedestrian and vehicle access to the summits.

Patricia Johanson, “Brockton Reborn. The City as an Ecological Art Form, Sanctuary, vol. 38, no. 2, Nov./Dec., 1998, pp. 15-16

Her husband, art critic and historian Eugene Goossen, died in 1997.

D.F.A. (honorary), Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, 1995

Baile Oakes, ed., Sculpting with the Environment—A Natural Dialogue, New York: van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995

Townsend Harris Medal, City College of New York, 1994

In 1992, the Brazilian government invited Johanson to attend the Earth Summit and to create a project for a park in the Amazon Rainforest. Her model for this shows a 150-foot-high (46 m) ramp, in the form of a Brazilian aerial plant, that allows visitors to experience a range of microhabitats at various levels. The ramp itself is intended to become encrusted by tropical vegetation. This project has been disrupted several times by changes in government and is currently on hold.

Barbara C. Matilsky, Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’ Interpretations and Solutions, New York: Rizzoli, 1992

Patricia Johanson, [Personal Statement], Art Journal, winter, 1989, pp. 337–39

Eleanor Munro, “Earthwork Odyssey,” The Christian Science Monitor, March 25, 1987, pp. 30–31

Laurie Garris, “The Changing Landscape: Patricia Johanson,” Arts and Architecture, vol. 3, no. 4, 1985, p. 59

Estella Lauter, Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth Century Women, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984

John Kouwenhoven, Half a Truth Is Better Than None, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1982

Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, New York: Pantheon, 1982, p. 145

Johanson’s first built project was commissioned in 1981 to restore Fair Park’s Leonhardt Lagoon, which was then in a badly degraded state. To solve the problems of an eroded shoreline, murky water and algal bloom, Johanson devised large sculptural forms that broke up wave action and selected indigenous plantings as microhabitats for wildlife. The gigantic, terra cotta-colored gunite sculptures, which doubled as pathways for human visitors and perches for birds and turtles, take the form of a Delta Duck-Potato (Sagittaria platyphylla) and a Spider Brake Fern (Pteris multifida). Today Leonhardt Lagoon is a functioning ecosystem in the heart of Dallas, where it also serves as a place of education and recreation. This is one of the earliest examples of art as bioremediation. For this and other large-scale urban projects, she works with a variety of experts, including scientists, engineers, and city planners, as well as local citizen groups.

Hal Foster, “Patricia Johanson,” Artforum, Vol. 19, No. 9, May, 1981, p. 75

In the 1980s, even as Johanson began her first built projects, she created several series of project drawings for gardens and fountains that emphasize water and color in the form of gigantic flowers, butterfly wings or snakes. For example, Tidal Color Gardens (1981–82) increase the visibility of tides, with images of butterfly wings or flowers changing as water flows in and out. The O’Keeffe/Equivalents-Color Garden are drawings for earth sculptures in the form of a butterfly wing with color patterns based on Alfred Stieglitz photographs of O’Keeffe.

Patricia Johanson: Drawings for the Camouflage House and Orchid Projects, New York: Rosa Esman Gallery, 1979 (exh. cat.);

Patricia Johanson: Plant Drawings for Projects, New York: Rosa Esman Gallery, 1978 (exh. cat.)

John Russell, “Projects from Plant Forms”, The New York Times, March 24, 1978, p. C-20

Artist’s Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, 1975

The House and Garden designs mark a reorientation in Johanson’s career. She gave up painting and sculpture and now focused on designs that are simultaneously art and landscape To prepare herself for translating project designs into large-scale sculptural landscapes, she began studying civil engineering and architecture at City College School of Architecture, New York, in 1971, receiving her B. Arch. in 1977.

Cyrus Field (1970–71), while still a large Minimalist sculpture, marks a transition. Using marble, cement and redwood slabs in their natural state, she created a maze of lines that lead visitors through a forest to reveal the changing, natural landscape. With this piece she began thinking of line as a compositional device to incorporate, rather than displace, nature. She also invented a way to mediate between human scale and the vastness of nature.

In the 1970s, Johanson began a family and settled in upstate New York, where she has lived ever since. She left the vibrant New York art scene for a 19th-century farmhouse on the rural Buskirk property of Eugene Goossen. Her first son, Alvar, was born in 1973 (followed by Gerrit in 1978 and Nathaniel in 1980). Here she was in constant touch with the natural seasons, but childrearing left only snatches of time to work.

In 1969, House & Garden (magazine) invited Johanson to design a garden. While this was never built, the commission prompted an outpouring of visionary ideas—150 small sketches—which she has continued to draw upon over the years. The drawings, accompanied by essays and explanatory notes, were a departure from traditional garden designs and also a rejection of the formalist orientation of the 1960s art world. Instead of art-for-art’s sake, her garden designs embodied meaningfulness and functionality.

Mary’s Garden is designed to remediate a coal mining site, which was purchased by the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1969. The garden incorporates elements that purify water and provide wildlife habitat while also referencing the cultural, geological and natural history of the place. Two large sculptural formations, Madonna Lily and Mary’s Rose, based on traditional religious symbols, shape the two main areas of the five-acre site. Remnants of mining activity and forms made of local stratified rock reference the previous, industrial uses of the land and geological eras. Seating and pathways offer opportunities for relaxation and contemplation of plants and wildlife at close range.

Debra Bricker Balken, Patricia Johanson: Drawings and Models for Environmental Projects, 1969–1986, Pittsfield, Mass.: The Berkshire Museum, 1987 (exh. cat)

Lucy Lippard, “The Long View: Patricia Johanson’s Projects, 1969-86” in Debra Bricker Balken, Patricia Johanson: Drawings and Models for Environmental Projects, 1969–1986, Pittsfield, Mass.: The Berkshire Museum, 1987 (exh. cat)

Eleanor Munro, “Foreword,” Patricia Johanson: Landscapes, 1969-1980 (exh. cat., 1981)

The Art of the Real (exhibition catalogue), New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968

Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art : A Critical Anthology, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968/Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995

Johanson began making large-scale, Minimal sculpture in 1966 with William Rush, consisting of 200 feet (61 m) of painted steel tee-beams laid flat in a clearing. In 1968 she increased her scale to 1,600 feet (490 m) with Stephen Long (inspired by the 19th century topographical and railway engineer), where 2-foot-wide (0.61 m), painted plywood segments were installed along an abandoned railroad track in Buskirk, New York. This was followed by other large-scale Minimalist sculptures sited outdoors. Johanson’s Minimalst sculptures introduced the idea of artworks that cannot be experienced all at once, still an important value in her work.

Johanson earned a Master’s in art history at Hunter College, New York in 1964. There she studied with Tony Smith, Eugene Goossen and Ad Reinhardt and met fellow art students Robert Morris, Carl Andre and Robert Barry. At this time, she worked as a researcher for New York publisher Benjamin Blom on a compendium of 18th and 19th century American artists. The project led to an opportunity to catalogue the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, who became an important mentor.

Patricia Johanson Papers, 1964–1998, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. http://siris-archives.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?&profile=all&source=~!siarchives&uri=full=3100001~!208921~!0#focus

Through her contacts at Bennington, Johanson became part of the 1960s New-York art-world. Her Bennington instructor, Tony Smith (sculptor), was a close friend and her art-history professor, Eugene Goossen, a mentor and later her husband. At this time she met fellow-artists Kenneth Noland, David Smith (sculptor), Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Philip Guston and Joseph Cornell. She also came to know art-critic Clement Greenberg and visionary architect Frederick John Kiesler.

Johanson’s paintings and sculptures of the 1960s have been classified as Minimalism and they were included in some of the earliest shows of Minimal Art: “8 Young Artists” (1964), “Distillation” (1966) and “Cool Art” (1968). Her Minimalist paintings used simple lines to explore the optical effects of color. These were shown at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York in the 1960s and her 28-foot-long (8.5 m) oil painting, William Clark, was included in the 1968 Museum of Modern Art contemporary art survey, “The Art of the Real”

“Of all the artists (so many of them women) who have become known over the last few decades for large-scale public art in/with nature—what is now called ‘eco-art,’ Johanson stands out as a seldom-acknowledged pioneer. Her writings of the late 1960s, when she was still in her twenties, are a cornucopia of possibilities for environmental art and planning that are still being ‘discovered’ today.”

Patricia Johanson, A Selected Retrospective: 1959-1973 (exhibition catalogue), Bennington College, 1973

Johanson’s enthusiasm for nature and for art began in childhood. She grew up in New York City, where she spent countless hours in Frederick Law Olmsted parks. Her mother, a former model, introduced her to the arts. As a high school student, she excelled at music, but at Bennington College (1958–1962) she was a painting major.

Ann Goldstein, A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968, Los Angeles, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press

Xin Wu, Patricia Johanson and the Re-Invention of Public Environmental Art, 1958-2010, Farnham, Surrey, Eng./Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2013

Patricia Johanson (born September 8, 1940, New York City) is an American artist. Johanson is known for her large-scale art projects that create aesthetic and practical habitats for humans and wildlife. She designs her functional art projects, created with and in the natural landscape, to solve infrastructure and environmental problems, but also to reconnect city-dwellers with nature and with the history of a place. These project designs date from 1969, making her a pioneer in the field of ecological-art (or eco-art.) Johanson’s work has also been classified as Land Art, Environmental Art, Site-specific Art and Garden Art. Her early paintings and sculptures are part of Minimalism.