Mark Dion | Some Recent Plagues
Mark Dion Copake, New York Some Recent Plagues 2025 Two-color lithograph, Off-white Hahnemuhle paper 13 x 16 in. AP v/v $1,200.00 “Some Recent Plagues” is a two-color hand-printed lithograph by Mark Dion, created in collaboration with Obee Editions. Printed in Dion’s signature palette of blue and red, the work recalls the directness of natural history illustration while turning its focus toward the political and cultural forces that haunt the present day. The print depicts a field of fantastical monsters drawn from a wide range of art historical sources: from Northern European Renaissance engravings to Japanese iconography and other mythic traditions. Each creature is carefully labeled with terms drawn from contemporary life: “Factory Farming,” “The Military Industrial Complex,” “Climate Change Deniers,” and others. Together they form a bestiary of modern power, corruption, and ideology. Through this mixture of historical imagery and modern critique, Dion transforms the page into a kind of illuminated manuscript for the 21st century. The monsters, rendered with precision and humor, embody the enduring vices and excesses of civilization, suggesting that our most dangerous “plagues” are not biological but cultural, economic, and moral. Technically, the lithograph demonstrates the depth and texture possible only through traditional hand-printing. The interplay of red and blue inks gives the image a vibratory tension, echoing the polarized dynamics of political discourse. “Some Recent Plagues” stands as both a satirical and sobering reflection on power, uniting Dion’s long-standing interests in taxonomy, ideology, and the entanglement of art and politics within a composition that is as visually captivating as it is intellectually charged. *** Mark Dion was born in 1961 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He initially studied in 1981-2 at the Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford in Connecticut, which awarded him a BFA (1986) and honorary doctorate (Ph.D) in 2002. From 1983 to 1984 he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and then the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program (1984-1985). He is an Honorary Fellow of Falmouth University in the UK (2014), and has an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (Ph.D.) from The Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia (2015). In the United States, he is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Los Angeles. Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The job of the artist, he says, is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention. Appropriating archaeological, field ecology and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates worksthat question the distinctions between ‘objective’ (‘rational’) scientific methods and ‘subjective’ (‘irrational’) influences. The artist’s spectacular and often fantastical curiosity cabinets, modeled on Wunderkammen of the 16th and 17th Century, exalt atypical orderings of objects and specimens. Dion also frequently collaborates with museums of natural history, aquariums, zoos and other institutions mandated to producepublic knowledge on the topic of nature. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Mark Dion questions the objectivity and authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society, tracking how pseudo-science, social agendas and ideology creep into public discourse and knowledge production.Dion has received numerous awards, including the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001) The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2007) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucida Art Award (2008) and was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 2019. He has had major exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004); Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2003); Tate Gallery, London (1999), and the British Museum of Natural History in London (2007) . “Neukom Vivarium” (2006), a permanent outdoor installation and learning labfor the Olympic Sculpture Park, was commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum. Dion produced a major permanent commission, ‘OCEANOMANIA: Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas’ for the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco. In 2016 Dion and his curatorial collaborator Sarina Basta produced the large scale exhibition, ExtraNaturel: Voyage initiatique dans la collection des Beaux-Arts de Paris, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris.Mark Dion is co-director of Mildred's Lane an innovative visual art education and residency non-profit program and think tank in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania.For over two decades Dion has worked in the public realm in a wide range of scales, from architecture projects to print interventions in newspapers. Some of his most recent large scale pubic project include "The Amateur Ornithologist Clubhouse" a Captain Nemo-like interior constructed in a vast gas tank in Essen, Germany, and "Den" a large scale folly in Norway's mountainous landscape which feature a massive sculpture of a sleeping bear in a cave, resting on a hill of material culture form the neolithic to the present. Dion has also produced large scale permanent commissions for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, the Montevideo Biannale in Uruguay, The Rose Art Museum, Johns Hopkins University, the city of Stavoren, Holland and the Port of Los Angeles. Dion is a known for his innovative collaborations with the collections of non-art museums and cultural institutions such as natural history museums, maritime museums and social history institutions.In 2017, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston hosted "Mark Dion: Misadventures of a Twenty First Century Naturalist", the largest American survey to date of the artist work. In 2018 the survey exhibition "Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World", was presented at The Whitechapel Gallery in London. In the Summer of 2019, "Mark Dion: Follies", was the featured exhibition at Storm King Art Center, in New York State. “The Perilous Texas Adventure of Mark Dion” was Dion’s exhibition at The Amon Carter Museum ofAmerican Art in Fort Worth in 2020. Like many of Dion’s exhibitions there is a complex and beautiful accompanying catalog of the project. Dion is currently exhibiting in the Getty’s PST-Art, Art and Science exhibition with an project at La Brea Tar Pits Museum and his exhibition “Delirious Toys is on view at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany. In October of 2024, Dion opened “ Mrs. Christopher’s House”, the fourth Troy Hill Art House in Pittsburgh, PA. The permanent work is an immersive three story installation.Dion lives with his wife and frequent collaborator Dana Sherwood in Copake, New York and works worldwide.
