The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Mark Dion produces artwork that consistently blurs the boundaries between natural history, art, and science. A recipient of The Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 2001, his works both critique and celebrate the cataloguing and presentation of both art and historical and natural materials by museums, exploring themes as diverse as archeology, consumer culture, ecology, environmentalism, and political activism. Dion's outdoor installation Memento Mori (My Glass is Run) takes the form of a mock New England cemetery dedicated to the great American naturalists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The work includes both slate and marble headstones, commemorating such well-known naturalists as Alexander Wilson and Charles Willson Peale, and lesser­ known individuals including Thomas Say and Jane Colden. Dion's work, suggestively installed in The Aldrich's inner courtyard, creates the moody atmosphere of a history­ laden churchyard.