Patricia Johanson (September 8, 1940 – October 16, 2024) was an American artist. Johanson is known for her large-scale art projects that create aesthetic and practical habitats for humans and wildlife. She designed her functional art projects, created with and in the natural landscape, to solve infrastructure and environmental problems, but also to reconnect city-dwellers with nature and with the history of a place. These project designs dated from 1969, making her a pioneer in the field of ecological-art (or eco-art.)Lippard, p. vii Johanson's work has also been classified as Land Art, Environmental Art, Site-Specific Art, and Garden Art. Her early paintings and sculptures are part of Minimalism.
Early life and education Johanson grew up in New York City, where enjoyed spending time in Central Park and Prospect Park, as well as in the city's art museums. Her mother, a former model, introduced her to the arts.; Munro, Originals, p. 462; Kelley, pp. 141-42, 149; Balken, p. 23 Her family later moved to Long Island, where she honed her skills as a clarinetist in the orchestra at Wellington C. Mepham High School in North Bellmore. After graduating in 1958, she went on to Bennington College in Vermont, where she earned a bachelor's degree in fine art in 1962.
Through her contacts at Bennington, Johanson became part of the 1960s New York art world. Her Bennington instructor, Tony Smith, was a close friend and her art history professor, Eugene Goossen, was a mentor and later became her husband. At this time she met fellow-artists Kenneth Noland, David Smith (sculptor), Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, and Joseph Cornell.Balken, p. 23; Kelley, pp. 47-48, 143-44; She also came to know art critic Clement Greenberg and visionary architect Frederick John Kiesler.Kelley, pp. 143-44
Johanson earned a Master's in art history at Hunter College, New York in 1964. There she studied with Tony Smith, Eugene Goossen, and Ad Reinhardt and met fellow art students Robert Morris, Carl Andre, and Robert Barry.Kelley, p. 144; Balken, p. 23 At this time, she worked as a researcher for New York publisher Benjamin Blom on a compendium of 18th and 19th century American artists. The project led to an opportunity to catalogue the work of Georgia O'Keeffe, who became an important mentor.Kelley, pp. 101, 104,150-52; Balken, p. 23
Minimalist art works Johanson's paintings and sculptures of the 1960s have been classified as Minimalism and they were included in some of the earliest shows of Minimal Art: “8 Young Artists” (1964), “Distillation” (1966) and “Cool Art” (1968).Goldstein, p. 20, 249-52, 383, 388; Battcock, p. 165 Her Minimalist paintings used simple lines to explore the optical effects of color.Goldstein, p. 249; Kelley, p. 50 These were shown at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York in the 1960s and her oil painting, "William Clark," was included in the 1968 Museum of Modern Art contemporary art survey, “The Art of the Real.” Kelley, p. 145 Another 28-foot-long canvas, “Minor Keith,” was exhibited at the Minimal Art retrospective at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004 and acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023.Goldstein, Ann, A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004; Art Institute of Chicago collection, https://www.artic.edu/artists/69391/patricia-johanson For a discussion of “Minor Keith” and related works see Xin Wu, Patricia Johanson and the Re-Invention of Public Environmental Art, 1958-2010, Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 20-21.
Johanson began making large-scale, Minimal sculpture in 1966 with William Rush, consisting of of painted steel tee-beams laid flat in a clearing.Kelley, pp. 49-50 In 1968 she increased her scale to with Stephen Long (inspired by the 19th century topographical and railway engineer), where , painted plywood segments were installed along an abandoned railroad track in Buskirk, New York.Kelley, pp. 5, 50; Goldstein, p. 249 This was followed by other large-scale Minimalist sculptures sited outdoors.Wu, House & Garden, vol. 1, pp. 18-19; Kelley, pp. 65-72 Johanson's Minimalist sculptures introduced the idea of artworks that cannot be experienced all at once, still an important value in her work.Goldstein, p. 252
Cyrus Field (1970–71), while still a large Minimalist sculpture, marks a transition. Using marble, cement, and redwood slabs in their natural state, she created a maze of lines that lead visitors through a forest to reveal the changing, natural landscape. With this piece, she began thinking of line as a compositional device to incorporate, rather than displace, nature. She also invented a way to mediate between human scale and the vastness of nature.Munro, p. 467; Kelley, p. 70; Patricia Johanson, A Selected Retrospective, no. 13; Balken, p. 19
The House and Garden Commission (1969) In 1969, House & Garden (magazine) invited Johanson to design a garden. While this was never built, the commission prompted an outpouring of visionary ideas—150 small sketches—which she continued to draw upon over the years. The drawings, accompanied by essays and explanatory notes, were a departure from traditional garden designs and also a rejection of the formalist orientation of the 1960s art world. Instead of art-for-art's sake, her garden designs embodied meaningfulness and functionality.Wu, House and Garden, vol. I, p. 9, 13, 15; Kouwenhoven, p. 229
Johanson's move from making objects to working with the natural world—first in drawings and later in actual commissions—has parallels as well as differences with the emergence of Earthworks by artists in her circle of friends, such as Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt.Wu, House and Garden, vol. I, p. 21; Munro, “Earthwork Odyssey,’‘ pp. 30-31 The similarity is working large-scale with the land itself. A difference is that many of Johanson's designs were meant to serve practical functions, such as flood control, habitat for local wildlife, and green roofs that absorb rainwater.Oakes, p. 150 Johanson also designed for urban, rather than remote locations.Kelley, p. 6; Munro,”Foreword,” p. 3 Another difference is that most of her designs are dominated by a simple, large image of a plant or animal.Wu, House and Garden, vol. I, p. 25
The House and Garden designs mark a reorientation in Johanson's career. She gave up painting and sculpture and focused on designs that are simultaneously art and landscape.Wu, House and Garden, vol. I, p. 9 To prepare herself for translating project designs into large-scale sculptural landscapes, she began studying civil engineering and architecture at City College School of Architecture, New York, in 1971, receiving her B. Arch. in 1977.Balken, pp. 24-25; Kelley, p. 7
Plant drawings for projects: 1974–1978 In the 1970s, Johanson began a family and settled in upstate New York, where she lived ever since.Lippard, “Panorama”, pp. viii-xi She left the vibrant New York art scene for a 19th-century farmhouse on the rural Buskirk property of Eugene Goossen. Her first son, Alvar, was born in 1973 (followed by Gerrit in 1978 and Nathaniel in 1980). Here she was in constant touch with the natural seasons, but childrearing left only snatches of time to work.Kelley, pp. 7, 9, 148
Her solution was to make tiny drawings of plants during the day and at night to transform them into designs for large-scale projects.Kelley, p. 9; Russell, "Projects from Plant Forms" At this time, she also studied botany texts.Kelley, p. 148 This was a new process: instead of depending on inspiration, she rendered nature in a straightforward way.Kelley, p. 148; Patricia Johanson: Plant Drawings for Projects
Water and color garden designs: 1980–1985 In the 1980s, even as Johanson began her first built projects, she created several series of project drawings for gardens and fountains that emphasize water and color in the form of gigantic flowers, butterfly wings or snakes. For example, Tidal Color Gardens (1981–82) increase the visibility of tides, with images of butterfly wings or flowers changing as water flows in and out.Balken, p. 10 The O’Keeffe/Equivalents-Color Garden are drawings for earth sculptures in the form of a butterfly wing with color patterns based on Alfred Stieglitz photographs of O’Keeffe.Kelley, p. 131; Balken, p. 11
Project commissions: From 1981
Fair Park Lagoon, Dallas (1981–1986)
Johanson's first built project was commissioned in 1981 to restore Fair Park's Leonhardt Lagoon, which was then in a badly degraded state.Kelley, p. 20; Oakes, p. 150 To solve the problems of an eroded shoreline, murky water and algal bloom, Johanson devised large sculptural forms that broke up wave action and selected indigenous plantings as microhabitats for wildlife.Oakes, pp. 150, 152; Garris, p. 59 The gigantic, terra cotta–colored gunite sculptures, which doubled as pathways for human visitors and perches for birds and turtles, take the form of a Delta Duck-Potato (Sagittaria platyphylla) and a Spider Brake Fern (Pteris multifida).Kelley, p. 21; Oakes, pp. 150, 152 She mimicked Delta Duck-Potato's root and built five-foot-wide paths on the lagoon where people can walk safely, and the same natural, curvy shapes for sculptures on the shoreline for people to sit on. The Spider Brake Fern sculpture winds across the lagoon with elegant, soft curves that stretch below and above the water, which ends on a crossway surrounded by lilies and irises. Those curves that go above the water provide safe platforms for turtles and other species to rest. Other than those sculptures, vegetation, floating plants, and tall grasses were everywhere. Today Leonhardt Lagoon is a functioning ecosystem in the heart of Dallas, where it also serves as a place of education and recreation.Oakes, p. 153 This is one of the earliest examples of art as bioremediation.Spaid, p. 67 For this and other large-scale urban projects, she worked with a variety of experts including scientists, engineers, and city planners, as well as with local citizen groups.Kelley, p. 3
The Patricia Johanson Foundation, dedicated to promoting greater public interest in the artist's legacy, public design, ecological art, and multi-functional infrastructure, was established in 2023.
Endangered Garden, San Francisco (1987–1997) When San Francisco needed a new pump station and holding tank next to the Bay, Johanson was invited to co-design a facility that would be sensitive to the site.Kelley, p. 26; Oakes, p. 15, 154; Matilsky, p. 64 She wanted something aesthetic, but also useful in ways beyond mere sewage treatment, so she designed a series of habitats to nourish threatened species.Kelley, p. 28; Oakes, p. 154 The roof of the sewer is a one-third-mile-long baywalk having colors and patterns in yellow, black, light blue, and red in organic curves, derive from the endangered San Francisco garter snake.Kelley, p. 26; Oakes, p. 154 The head of the serpent is a mound that serves as a microhabitat for butterflies. The Ribbon Worm Tidal Steps is a purple ribbon worm that zigzags and surrounds the rocks near the tides, fill with water at high tide, creating homes for small marine life.
Park for the Amazon Rainforest, Obidos, Brazil (1992) In 1992, the Brazilian government invited Johanson to attend the Earth Summit and to create a project for a park in the Amazon rainforest. Her model for this shows a ramp, in the form of a Brazilian aerial plant, that allows visitors to experience a range of microhabitats at various levels. The ramp itself is intended to become encrusted by tropical vegetation. This project has been disrupted several times by changes in government and is currently on hold.Kelly, pp. 57, 61; Oakes, p. 156
The Rocky Marciano Trail, Brockton, Massachusetts (1997–1999)