The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

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Mary Miss

Mary Miss has been “redefining how art is integrated into the public realm” since the early 1970s. A pioneer of land art and site-specific work, Miss was a leader of the 1970s feminist art movement and a founding member of the feminist journal Heresies. Her recent public artworks confront topical issues that trouble our planet. In 2009 she founded the City as Living Laboratory, an “interdisciplinary think tank” with the purpose of “making sustainability possible through art.”

Miss presented January 1971 in Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists. A concentric maze constructed out of cardboard and paint, it filled an entire room. On view here is a related work from the period, Room Fence. Re-created for The Aldrich, it is part of a series of room-scaled works that Miss made in New York in the early 1970s. The artist was raised in Colorado, and Room Fence takes its inspiration from her memory of “fences in the landscape out West.”

Also on view by Miss is a recent project, Connect the Dots. It documents a public art intervention created for Lucy R. Lippard’s exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change. Miss created an experiential map that visually tracks the highwater hazards of Boulder Creek.

Images

Wall with a black and white print of the ground with blue dots above in a line along with a photograph of a neighborhood of the same blue dots.
Several unpainted wooden fences in a row that fill a gallery space.
Catalogue page with a work by Mary Miss from 1971.

Audio

Hear artist Mary Miss describe her works on view in The Aldrich exhibition, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone.

The Blue Dots, A Short Film

The Blue Dots, A Short Film on Mary Miss’s Connect the Dots, 2007, Directed by Marshal Frech. Courtesy of the artist.

Related Exhibitions

Pindell
April 18, 1971, to June 13, 1971 | Old Hundred

Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists
Install view of a gallery with a figurative sculpture to the left with a projection in the background, a soft sculpture hung on the wall at center and painting.
June 6, 2022 to January 8, 2023 | Lobby, Leir Gallery, Screening Room, Ramp, Project Space, Balcony, South Gallery, Sound Gallery, Opatrny Gallery

52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone

Top image: 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone (installation view, Mary Miss, Room Fence, 1970/2022, Courtesy of the artist), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, June 6, 2022 to January 8, 2023. Photo: Jason Mandella