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Patricia Johanson and the Re-Invention of Public Environmental Art, 1958–2010
by Xin Wu
“Impeccably researched and richly detailed, this book addresses the issue of translation between visual arts and landscape design in the 50 more years career of Patricia Johanson, an important artist in the second half of the twentieth-century. Examining the artist’s search for an ‘art of the real’ as a member of the post-World War II New York art world, and how such pursuit has led her from painting and sculpture to public garden and environmental art, Xin Wu argues for the significance of the process of art creation, challenging the centrality of art objects.”
Ashgate Publishing
March 2013
9781409435440
Routledge
2016
9781138253773
Available from Routledge
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Patricia Johanson’s Environmental Remedies:
Connecting Soil to Water
by Sue Spaid
“‘Patricia Johanson’s Environmental Remedies’ invites viewers to consider water’s critical affiliation with soil, so as to prevent the ‘perfect storm’. Since 1969, Johanson has devised numerous plans to keep rainfall local, while introducing floodplains to mitigate flood damage and prevent soil erosion. Using natural infiltration (plants) to recycle water not only refreshes aquifers/ reservoirs and recharges groundwater, but it propagates rain since plants transpire 90% of the water that their roots absorb from the soil. Those who take rainfall for granted or dismiss its impact either overestimate its abundance or underestimate its power to reshape land forms.”
Millersville University
October 2015
2016
9780692564226
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A Field Guide to Patricia Johanson's Works
Built, Proposed, Collected & Published
by Sue Spaid
“This Field Guide to Patricia Johanson's built and unbuilt projects aims to capture her thought process in the act of drawing. Each project, whether built or not, owes its inception to the series of 150+ garden designs she produced in 1969 as a result of a House & Garden commission. Her ‘Plant Drawings and Models’ of the 70s and 80s and later design proposals reiterate concepts first developed during her late twenties. Since the mid-80s, she's successfully implemented and tested many of her early ideas. This field guide not only provides relevant background material for each of her built projects and many that remain unbuilt, but it furnishes travel tips for those eager to experience her immersive works first-hand, as they are meant to be engaged.”
Contemporary Museum Baltimore
2012
9780970098627
Available from Battenkill Books
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Patricia Johanson's House and Garden Commission
Re-construction of Modernity
by Xin Wu
“In 1969, House and Garden magazine commissioned one of the first minimalist artists, Patricia Johanson, to propose new directions for American garden art. Having never been exhibited or published before as a whole, the resulting garden proposals reveal an unknown dimension of the New York art world of the late 1960s. Three years of research have brought 146 surviving drawings to light. They demonstrate the intimate progress of the artist’s engagement with nature in her quest for an art concerned with ethical relationships between humans and the natural world. Shuttling between the West and the East, and the contemporary and the historical, Johanson takes equal distances from earthworks created by her peer artists such as Robert Smithson, and the environmentalism advocated by landscape architects following Ian McHarg. Her vision of a new modernity is still significant today.”
Harvard University Press
March 2008
9780884023340
Available from Harvard University Press
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Art and Survival
Patricia Johanson’s Environmental Projects
by Caffyn Kelley
“Artist Patricia Johanson is one of the creative angels of these dark times, and Caffyn Kelley's vivid text carries the message. Johanson designed expanded site-works for congested waterfronts, endangered forests and urban wastelands. Each of her visionary ground plans is a saving grace for our earth-damaging culture. Here indeed is art for survival. Read this wonderful book!”
- Eleanor Munro, author of Originals: American Women Artists
Islands Institute
December 2005
9780973833201
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