EARLY LIFE:
“Though most of her childhood was spent on the west coast, she would later return to live in New York City and there complete the installations of a majority of her work. Her father was a career military officer, that kept the family constantly moving, so parts of Miss' work hints at years of being billeted in army barracks and forts.”
EDUCATION:
"It was a traditional program she entered and it was during this time she realized art could be about ideas and not just about the shape of something or the look of something. She attended graduate school at the Maryland Art Institute."
PERSONAL INFO:
“Married Bruce Colvin, another sculptor, in 1967, but was divorced in 1986.”
ART:
“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.”
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY:
“Her work can best be described as playful surrealism. Her work is resonate 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.”
“She 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 downtown.”
“All of Mary Miss' installations are site responsive and integrated into the land. She uses images of our everyday environment for references and a look that is casual and natural, but they are definitely designed and deliberate. These spatial experiences often are found historically in vernacular architecture.”
“Mary Miss likes to work on her own; thinking things through. Because of this and the fact her work physically and visually integrated into the site she spends a lot of time on location, pacing out the space, inspecting indigenous structures and photographing all of it.”
Completed Works:
- Battery Park City; South Cove, New York City, New York.
- Field Rotation; Governors State University, Illinois.
- Pool Complex; Orchard Valley, Laumeier.
- 'Untitled'; O'Neill Federal Building.
- 'Untitled'; University of Washington.
- Veiled Landscape; Lake Placid, New York.
- Staged Gates; Dayton, Ohio.
- Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys; Nassau County Museum, Long Island.
- Sunken Pool; Greenwich, Connecticut.
- Greenwood Pond: Double Site; Des Moines, Iowa.
--- Henderson, A. (1997, February 14). Mary Miss. Retrieved April 2, 2015, from http://home.earthlink.net/~thelaway/ea/people/miss.html)
AWARDS/EXHIBITIONS:
“A recipient of multiple awards, Mary Miss has been the subject of exhibitions at the 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.”
“Among others, her 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.”
CAREER:
“She has developed the "City as Living Lab", a framework for making issues of sustainability tangible through collaboration and the arts. Trained as a sculptor, her work creates situations emphasizing a site’s history, its ecology, or aspects of the environment that have gone unnoticed.”
“Mary Miss has collaborated closely with architects, planners, engineers, ecologists, and public administrators on projects as diverse as creating a temporary memorial around the perimeter of Ground Zero, marking the predicted flood level of Boulder, Colorado, revealing the history of the Union Square Subway station in New York City or turning a sewage treatment plant into a public space.”
RECENT PROJECTS:
“Recent projects include an installation focused on water resources in China for the Olympic Park in Beijing and a temporary installation at a seventeenth-century park in Delhi, India as part of the exhibition 49°: Public Art and Ecology. A proposal for a permanent project at the North Carolina Museum of Art explores the presence and movement of water through the site by recovering and revitalizing elements of the watershed to reveal the wetland processes in the region.”
---U.S. Department of State - Art in Embassies. (n.d.). Retrieved April 2, 2015, from http://art.state.gov/artistdetail.aspx?id=102696
CAREER:
“In the course of her career she has expanded from temporary site installations to larger scale transformations of infrastructure”
PAST PROJECT:
Broadway: 1000 Steps project—interview
M.F.A. in 1968 from the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Maryland Art Institute.
--- Mary Miss. (2012, September 30). Retrieved April 2, 2015, from http://newyork.thecityatlas.org/people/mary-miss/
PAST PROJECT:
Info on Pruitt-Igoe:
--- Duffy, R. (2014, August 11). Reflection: St. Louis Needs To Unravel The Lessons Of Pruitt-Igoe. Retrieved April 2, 2015, from http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53e29b74e4b0d1dab65f7762/t/5411c0ede4b002d4a35a3f40/1410449645782/Reflection_ St. Louis Needs To Unravel The Lessons Of Pruitt-Igoe _ Duffy.pdf
PAST PROJECT: Info on FLOW project:
---Princenthal, N. (2012, April 1). Mary Miss: Knowing Your Place. Retrieved April 2, 2015, from http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53e29b74e4b0d1dab65f7762/t/5411ba91e4b03f52769d217d/1410448017895/2012-04 Art in America - N Princinthal.pdf
PAST PROJECT: Interview: Artpark
---Firmin, S. (2009, June 24). Interview with Mary Miss, Artist. Retrieved April 2, 2015, from http://www.as-ap.org/oralhistories/interviews/interview-mary-miss-artist