Talk

MFA Art Practice is pleased to present its summer 2017 keynote speakers Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett, co-directors of Mildred's Lane, an "experiment in living" in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Since the early 1990s, Mark Dion has examined the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge and the natural world. Appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering and exhibiting objects, the artist creates works that address distinctions between objective scientific methods and subjective influences. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Dion questions the authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society.

J. Morgan Puett was born in Hahira, Georgia in 1957. She received her BFA in painting and sculpture in 1981; then a MFA in sculpture and experimental filmmaking from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985. Puett is a trans-disciplinary creative producer with accomplished work in the areas of installation art practices, clothing and furniture design, architecture, fine art, film, and more; she rearranges these intersections by applying conceptual tools including research-based methods in history, biology, new economies, design, craft and collaboration. Morgan’s early work forged new territory by intervening into the fashion system with a series of storefront installations and clothing/dwelling/event projects in Manhattan in the 1980s and 1990s, then produced a long series of research installations on the histories of the needle trade systems in museums around the world. These past and present works are innovations in the realm of new social engagement. Puett is the architect of The Mildred’s Lane Project, which continues to forge new ground citing that is profoundly a social and political practice.