Agnes Denes

Agnes Denes
Born	1931 Budapest
Known for	Land Art
Notable work	Wheatfield, Tree Mountain
Movement	Conceptual Art

File:Tree Mountain sketch.jpg

Tree Mountain located in Ylöjärvi, Finland

Agnes Denes is internationally known for works investigating science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, poetry, history, and music, created in a wide range of mediums. Her conceptually-based artistic practice is distinctive in terms of its engagement with aesthetics and socio-political ideas. Born in Hungary in 1931, raised in Sweden, and educated in the United States, her artistic career began in the 1960s. She has since participated in more than 450 exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world including, among others, solo shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1974); the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1979); and retrospective surveys at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (1992); the Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (2003); and the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2008). Her work has also been featured in such international surveys as the Biennale of Sydney (1976); documenta 6, Kassel, Germany (1977); the Venice Biennale (1978); and more recently Systems, Actions & Processes: 1965–1975, PROA Foundation, Buenos Aires (2011); Erre: variations labyrinthiques, Centre Pompidou, Metz (2011–12); Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph: 1964–1977, Art Institute of Chicago (2012); Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012); and Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, Brooklyn Museum (2012).

Works by the artist are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Kunsthalle Nürnberg; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; among others. As a pioneer of Land Art, Agnes Denes created Rice/Tree/Burial in 1968 in Sullivan County, New York. Acknowledged as the first site-specific performance piece with ecological concerns, it was enacted ten years later on an expanded scale at Artpark in Lewiston, New York. Wheatfield – A Confrontation is arguably Agnes Denes’s best known work. It was created during a six-month period in the spring, summer, and fall of 1982 when Denes, with the support of the Public Art Fund, planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City and the World Financial Center). Among her many other artistic achievements is Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule, a monumental earthwork reclamation project and the first man-made virgin forest, situated in Ylöjärvi, Western Finland. The site was dedicated by the President of Finland upon its completion in 1996 and is legally protected for the next four hundred years.

Agnes Denes is equally known for her innovative use of metallic inks and other nontraditional materials in creating a prodigious body of drawings and prints that delineate her explorations in a variety of disciplines. She has completed public and private commissions in North and South America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East, and has received numerous honors and awards including four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; four grants from the New York State Council on the Arts; the DAAD Fellowship, Berlin, Germany (1978); the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award (1985); the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT (1990); the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (1998); the Jill Watson Award for Transdisciplinary Achievement in the Arts from Carnegie Mellon University (1999); the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007); and the Ambassador’s Award for Cultural Diplomacy (2008) from the American Embassy in Hungary. Denes holds honorary doctorates from Ripon College and Bucknell University and has had fellowships at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. She lectures extensively at colleges and universities throughout the United States and abroad, and participates in global conferences on art and the environment. She is the author of six books and is featured in numerous other publications on a wide range of subjects. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York.

Selected works

• Rice/Tree/Burial 1968, Eco-Logic, Sullivan County, New York; re-created 1977 at Artpark

• Wheatfield, a Confrontation 1982 Manhattan, Battery Park City landfill

• Tree Mountain-a living time capsule 1996, Ylöjärvi, Finland

• A Forest for Australia reforestation of Red Gum, She Oak, and Paperbark trees in Melbourne Australia 1998

• Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie masterplan, 2000

Publications

• The Human Argument Spring Publications, Putnam, Connecticut, 2008. ISBN 978-0-88214-569-3

Awards and honors

• 1997 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome
• Watson Transdisciplinary Art Award, Carnegie Mellon University 1999

Biographies

• Agnes Denes [1]
• Biography [2]
• Greenmuseum Bio [3]

See also

• Restoration ecology