Lecture by Mark Dion

The job of the artist, Mark Dion says, is to go against the grain, to challenge perception and convention. Dion’s large-scale projects examine the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. He questions the roles of all sorts of specialists—archaeologists, historians, curators, and beyond—appropriating their methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects in order to question the usual distinctions between objective/rational and subjective/irrational.

Dion has received numerous honors, including the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and he has had major recent exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Miami Art Museum, and Tate Gallery in London. He lives and works in Pennsylvania.