Biosphere:
Laboratory
(1993). 96” x
120”. Oil on
wood. Image
courtesy of the
artist and
Sperone
Westwater.
try to articulate our hopes and fears about
the future. Knowing it would be a very public
project, I decided it needed to an extremely
accessible image that would appeal to those
educated about art and science history but
would also be decipherable to anyone (it ended up on Broadway and Lafayette Street). My
first decision was to make sure it looked like
a familiar American mid-twentieth-century
landscape painting. I also knew I needed to
educate myself about the history of artificial
selection and the current biotech revolution
and what the important issues were. I had
a number of great conversations with Rob
DeSalle, the head of Molecular Biology at
The American Museum of Natural History.
Then, if you look closely, there are some very
familiar agricultural characters and scenarios
about agriculture that have been tweaked and
transformed. It was certainly a huge challenge and a lot of fun.
JB: I imagine that your work is generally very
research heavy—what is your process like in creat-
20
ing a painting or series, and what series has taught
you the most or been the most fun?
AR: It’s been a long process, and I love the
idea of collecting information for my work.
The idea of research started when Mark
Dion and I decided to work on “Concrete
Jungle,” an ongoing collaborative project we
started in 1989. We were talking about our
interest in invasive species, and he suggested
I read a text by the ecologist Norman Myers, which he was very enthusiastic about—
I loved it because it created a fascinating
framework for what I wanted to paint. Mark
and I ended up editing a cross-cultural book
about the subject, Concrete Jungle, published
in 1996. I again realized how much I enjoyed
research when I went on a two-month trip
to Guyana in 1994 with Mark, and the more
I read about the area, the more I could appreciate the experience of being in the field
and having first-hand experience. I used this
skill in 1997 when I was hired by the Museum
of Natural History to go to Manaus, Brazil. I
SciArt in America December 2014