November 13 through December 2026
Mark Dion began his series Ursus maritimus in 1990, documenting polar bears in natural history museum displays across the world. As an artist with his fingers on the pulse of ecological issues, Dion recognized that the polar bear would become the poster child of global warming, a new environmental threat emerging in public discourse in the early 1990s. The arctic was swiftly transforming from a space savage and threatening into a landscape considered fragile and threatened. The perception of polar bears was also shifting from an animal we needed to be protected from to animals we needed to protect. This body of work, which continues to this day, documents the change in cultural and institutional attitudes towards both the Arctic and the bears themselves.
On view here is the entire first series of Urus maritimus , first exhibited in 1992. These photos where printed by renown photographers Moyra Davey and Laura Larson. The black and white photos were made by Dion employing the most basic, trusty Pentax K-1000, as he toured natural history museums around the world. He capture polar bears in an astonishing variety of scientific displays organized around, orthodox taxonomy, biogeography, naturalistic habitat dioramas, and hunting trophy displays. This conceptual, archival project features displays of the polar bear in some of the most celebrated natural history museums including; the Hessisches Landesmuseum (Darmstadt), the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet (Stockholm), and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris), among many others.
Dion is often considered an institutional critique artist known for working in the realms of science history, and environmental politics. The polar bear exhibits he photographs are human made habitats where animals are captured in fictional wild situations as representations of human empowerment and domination. Dion exposes natural history museums mediating viewer experience through controlling the ideological narrative, projecting culture and meaning, and in the case of polar bears often overlooking the reality of our shifting knowledge and attitudes toward the species and its environment.
Currently, Mark Dion has an exhibition at The Concord Museum in Massachusetts titled, Eccentric Collectors Like Us.
Mark Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The job of the artist, he says, is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention. Appropriating archaeological, field ecology and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between ‘objective’ (‘rational’) scientific methods and ‘subjective’ (‘irrational’) influences. The artist’s spectacular and often fantastical curiosity cabinets, modeled on Wunderkammen of the 16th and 17th Century, exalt atypical orderings of objects and specimens. Dion also frequently collaborates with museums of natural history, aquariums, zoos and other institutions mandated to produce public knowledge on the topic of nature. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Mark Dion questions the objectivity and authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society, tracking how pseudo-science, social agendas and ideology creep into public discourse and knowledge production. (Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC)
November 13 through December
Winter: Open Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and by appointment anytime. Special edition MARK DION Prints and Drawings are available. A great holiday gift!
A closing reception with the artist will be announced.
