Patricia Johanson

Patricia Johanson (born September 8, 1940, New York City) is an American artist. Johanson is known for her large-scale art projects that create aesthetic and practical habitats for humans and wildlife. She designs 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 date from 1969, making her a pioneer in the field of ecological-art (or eco-art.) 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's enthusiasm for nature and for art began in childhood. She grew up in New York City, where she spent countless hours in Frederick Law Olmsted parks. Her mother, a former model, introduced her to the arts. As a high school student, she excelled at music, but at Bennington College (1958–1962) she was a painting major.

Through her contacts at Bennington, Johanson became part of the 1960s New-York art-world. Her Bennington instructor, Tony Smith (sculptor), was a close friend and her art-history professor, Eugene Goossen, a mentor and later her husband. At this time she met fellow-artists Kenneth Noland, David Smith (sculptor), Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline, Philip Guston and Joseph Cornell. She also came to know art-critic Clement Greenberg and visionary architect Frederick John Kiesler.

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. 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.

Her husband, art critic and historian Eugene Goossen, died in 1997.

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). Her Minimalist paintings used simple lines to explore the optical effects of color. 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”

Johanson began making large-scale, Minimal sculpture in 1966 with ''William Rush'', consisting of of painted steel tee-beams laid flat in a clearing. 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. This was followed by other large-scale Minimalist sculptures sited outdoors. Johanson's Minimalst sculptures introduced the idea of artworks that cannot be experienced all at once, still an important value in her work.

''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.

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 has 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.

Johanson's move from making objects to working with the natural world—at 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. 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. Johanson also designed for urban, rather than remote locations. Another difference is that most of her designs are dominated by a simple, large image of a plant or animal.

The ''House and Garden'' designs mark a reorientation in Johanson's career. She gave up painting and sculpture and now focused on designs that are simultaneously art and landscape 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.

Plant drawings for projects: 1974-78

In the 1970s, Johanson began a family and settled in upstate New York, where she has lived ever since. 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.

Her solution was to make tiny drawings of plants during the day and at night to transform them into designs for large-scale projects. At this time, she also studied botany texts. This was a new process: instead of depending on inspiration, she rendered nature in a straightforward way.

Water and color garden designs: 1980-85

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. 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.

Project commissions: 1981-present

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. 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. 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