Betty Beaumont (born January 8, 1946) is a Canadian-American site-specific and conceptual installation artist, sculptor, and photographer. She is an internationally recognized artist known to explore cross-disciplinary media, interweaving the environmental, social, economic, political, and the architectural. Beaumont lives and works in New York City.
Beaumont's diverse body of work challenges global social awareness, as well as socioeconomic and ecological practices. Beaumont is involved with investigating solution-based sustainability strategiesPhillips, Patricia C. "Beaumont: Who Survives?", Art Journal, Vol. 65, No. 1, (Spring 2006), pp 56-7. that reflect contemporary, historic, and cultural perspectives and environmental and social conditions.
One of Beaumont's most notable works is the environmental installation Ocean Landmark (1978–1980), a grand-scale underwater project. The installation consists of 17,000 neutralized coal fly-ash blocks strategically submerged three miles off Fire Island National Seashore to lay on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, creating an artificial habitat for marine life.
Early life and education Born in Toronto, Ontario, Beaumont emigrated with her family to Los Angeles at an early age. She attended California State University, Northridge where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1969. Beaumont earned her master's degree from College of Environmental Design in the School of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972 before moving to Chicago and then to New York City in 1973, where she currently resides. In 1976, Beaumont built a film set for Andy Warhol at The Factory, worked part-time with filmmaker Barbara Kopple, and danced at Brooklyn Academy of Music with Twyla Tharp in Half the Hundreds, as well as Anna Halprin at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Work Beaumont has described art as central to shaping the world. "[Art] asks questions, provokes imagination and presents new paradigms for thought and meaning. The flow from the specific, concrete, and technical, to the abstract, meditative and lyrical characterizes my work."
Beaumont's work questions and seeks to bring awareness to various worldviews and perspectives, often through the lens of the shared human frameworks of language, image, and object.
Many of her projects contain bodies of work in themselves, as she continues to return to contemporary questions that provoke her to expand on these threads of ideas using new technological tools.
Works (1969–1980) While a graduate student at the School of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Beaumont documented the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill through a series of black and white photographs called Steam Cleaning The Santa Barbara Shores… Her photographs captured the destruction of the shoreline ecosystem by the power washing oil from the rocks with high-pressure steam hoses.
The image is partnered with a work from 2001 entitled Timeline of Global Oil Spills 1960-2004, a stark black and white pigment print that graphically lists the many major global oil spills in a poetic timeline.
Her earliest work paralleled the growth of the West Coast women's art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Time spent living in the high desert mesas with the Native American Hopi led her to an exploration of society's interactions with nature and the environment. In the early 70s she began a series of site-specific outdoor installations, which sought to re-establish a relationship between people and their environment and were inspired in part by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.
In 1977, Beaumont created Cable Piece, forming an enormous iron ring of 4,000 feet of cable measuring 100 feet in diameter, which was left to bury itself slowly in the ground on a farm in Macomb, Illinois. The rust content of the ring affected the growth pattern of the soil, over time transforming the metal ring into a lush grass circle. The ring configuration suggested technological and mythological connections with the Fermi Laboratory, a neutron accelerator plant located nearby, and Native American burial and ceremonial mounds of the Midwest.
Beaumont's 1977 work Found Words is a record of found fragments originating from anonymous people and their unknown activities. After nine months of photographing the fragments, the systemic work began when the first one was brought into her studio. It began a collection, which culminated in a series of 116 hand-made paper works and collaboration with Hiroaki Sato who translated 9 months of autobiographical fragments. After exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (1977) and Kyoto (1978), a collaboration with poet and linguist Kyoko Iriye that translated the found images into the closest Japanese language character. The project culminated in a box set of paper works and a comprehensive artist's book, featuring English text by Beaumont translated into Japanese by Hiroaki Sato.
In 1978, Beaumont created a set of chromogenic prints entitled Love Canal USA. Hooker Chemical Company had used the Love Canal, near Niagara Falls, New York, as a dumping site for several decades. The waste eventually seeped into and contaminated the neighborhood's soil and groundwater, leading to a host of health problems for residents. Her photographs of deserted and boarded houses surrounding Love Canal addressed the concepts of community identity, what "home" is to those dispossessed, and the reclamation of a history propelled by pollution and corporate neglect that sought for it to be erased.
A decade of large-scale studio sculptures, shown at the National Museum of Art in Tokyo and in Kyoto, as well as a decade of five outdoor concept-based performative site-works, culminated in the grand-scale Ocean Landmark (1978–1980), which also dealt with the issues of reclamation and the future, working through the one toward the viability of the other. This art-and-science collaboration is a trans-disciplinary environmental artwork that recycles waste, establishes a habitat for fish, is fished and continues to feed people, is a model for new industry that considers industrial ecology, and is a vision of how to revitalize the coastal fishing industry.
Ocean Landmark (1978–1980) Beaumont's Ocean Landmark (1978–1980) was a $3 million project that was jointly sponsored by the US Department of Energy, The Smithsonian Institution, Bell Labs, Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, America the Beautiful Fund, Media Bureau, and in-kind contributions.
She collaborated with a team of scientists and engineers who were experimenting with coal-waste and ways to stabilize the industrial byproduct in water. She in turn proposed the concept of processing waste material into an underwater sculptureGrande, John K. "Culture Nature Catalyst: Betty Beaumont", Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists, State University New York Press, 2005, pp, 255-65. that would function as an artificial reef that would create a place where people might come and fish. Rendered inert, the waste material was laid 70 feet below the Atlantic Ocean's surface and became a lush underwater garden.
Although the grand-scale sculpture, strongly influenced by feminism, psychoanalysis, and cognition is not visible to viewers, the submersive installation of the project can be experienced through a VRML representation, produced by Beaumont and other participants in 2000, through New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).
Ocean Landmark is listed as a "fish haven" on the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) coastal navigational map and has received a volume of critical attention in publications and articles like Phaidon's Land and Environmental Art edited by Jeffrey Kastner, Art Press (1987), Heresies Magazine (1988), and The Wall Street Journal (1990) among others.
Works (1984-present) In the following years, Beaumont worked to develop Windows on Multinationals (1984–1987), Toxic Imaging (1987) and El Otro Sendero (1988). These ambitious and extensively researched combined-media installations deal with the poisoning of mental and physical health, the uprooting of social structures, economic and political corruption, environmental pollution and media manipulation.
In 1989, Beaumont began working on a project that would continue to develop and expand for the next two decades. Titled A Night in Alexandria...The Rainforest...Whose Histories Are They Anyway?, Beaumont created a transformative and cautionary dissertation on the meaning of loss.
Beaumont created a list of over 150 personally significant books and collected replicas from bookstores. The books were treated, burned, displayed, and arranged in over thirty feet of floor to ceiling shelving. Through the metaphor of fire and the social horror of book burning, the project grieves the irretrievable loss of species (DNA) contained in the rainforest, as irretrievable as the loss of the ancient body of knowledge contained at the Library of Alexandria—both sources of encyclopedic information.
For the first anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in Prague, Beaumont created the installation Voices (Whose What Which) (1990) at the Stalinov Pomnik. The opening was attended by Vaclav Havel. This work invites the viewer to participate in a visual dialogue questioning the origins and location of voice by exploring public language in a public place.
A founding member of REPOhistory, she coordinated and produced, with other artists, the medical section of Choice Histories (1992) installation at Artists Space.
In 2004, Beaumont created Camouflaged Cell Concealment Sites, a series of color photographs documenting camouflaged cell towers disguised as everyday sights such as palm trees, water towers, and cacti throughout various climates like Azusa, California; Phoenix, Arizona; Atlanta, Georgia; and Sparta, New Jersey. She seeks to examine the extent in which greenwashing exhibits itself throughout natural environments and a reconsideration of preconceptions.
In 2006, Beaumont created Boxed In/Boxed Out: The Mobile Studio Project, an ambitious solo installation pointing to the suburbanization of Manhattan following the displacement of artists and demolition of historic architecture in favor of large-scale condos, which was held across from the NY Stock Exchange in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's (LMCC) 3,000 square-foot Swing Space.
In 2008, Beaumont had a solo exhibition at the New Arts Program in Kutztown, PA,Slupe, Ellen. "Inside PA", Art Matters: The Philadelphia Region's Magazine of the Arts, 2008, p. 8. entitled Who Will Our Children Sing Songs About in 100 Years?, an installation that consisted of four geometric sculptures: a line (parallel to the floor), a circle, a triangle and a rectangle, all constructed of children's chairs. The colors for the four chair-arranged geometries relate directly to the flag colors of nations with the fastest explosion or implosion of population change: USA, Africa, China, and India, while Children's XO laptops display world clock counters.
A related work, Way (2009), contains 21 variations of the word Way paired with WHOSE, WHAT, WHICH in Swahili, Hindi, Chinese, and English written on 500-sheets of a wall-mounted, tear-off-sheet tablet. The work is one in a series using tear-off-sheet tablets. As each sheet is torn, the work is changed to reveal one of the permutations challenging the viewer to re-examine their beliefs, actions or inactions, tolerance of misinformation and potential to effect change- while the pile reflects viewer participation.