Joan Dickinson

Beginning as a young woman, Dickinson developed and presented performances, exhibitions, and public art projects that merge mythological, autobiographical, geographical, and historical lines of inquiry. During a twelve-year period, Dickinson moved her creative practice to a 200-acre wetland in rural Illinois often living outdoors––sleeping in abandoned deer beds––or inhabiting a six-floor silo and bat-infested barn. In that place and its surrounds. Dickinson worked in cooperation with others to unpin straightened rivers, remove agricultural tiles, rout buckthorn, and safely conduct controlled burns. She became a beekeeper and herbalist and, for those twelve years, sat daily and nightly beneath the sun, moon, and stars in order to observe and integrate their alignments. In so doing, Dickinson familiarized herself with one place––its stories and mythologies entwined with its geographies, communities, and climate––and the wider connection of one place to others and all that is embodied within that suggestion.

Other work has been presented in more traditional contemporary art spaces and theaters: the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London,[1] the Théatre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels, Belgium, PS 122 in NYC,[2] Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California,[3] and in Chicago: the Lyric Opera of Chicago,[4] the Chicago Cultural Center,[5] Hyde Park Art Center,[6] Randolph Street Gallery,[7] the Lurie Garden at Millennium Park,[8] the Museum of Contemporary Art,[9] and the State of Illinois Museum.[10]

• Goat Island Retrospective/Exhibition + Performances + Symposium (2019)[11][12][13][14][15]
• The Cooking School of the Air (2019)
• Gathering A Museum: the Tides at Flinders Island (2017-2018)
• Coming in from the North (2007-2016)[16][17]
• The Dream of the Owl Sisters (book; 2015)
• The Dream of the Owl Sisters (performance; 2013)[18]
• The Cooking School of the Air (as a work-in-progress; 2012)[19]
• Mule Deer Are Everywhere in the West from A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park (2012)[20]
• Lindow Man from Fat Boy Review (2011)[21]
• With All that She Is She Desires to Give Great Pleasure (2007–2009)[22]
• pretty pretty pretty over there too (2007)[23][24]
• Degrees of Wildness/The Charioteer (2006)[25]
• The Language of Birds (2005)[26]
• Atmosphere (2005)[27]
• In the Palace of the Night Heron (2004)as part of Bird Brain with Jennifer Monson[28][29][30]
• 13 Moon (2003–2004)[31]
• Devotion (2001–2002)[32]
• Drove Road (1999–2000)[33]
• The Architecture of Honey (1997–1998)[34]
• Flower (1996–1997)
• Hunter’s Moon (1995–1996)[35]
• Hula (1994)[36]
• Big Goddess Powwow (1994-1996)[37][38][39][40][41]
• Black Cake (1993)[42]
• White Castle (1993)[43]
• Mental Beauty/Enduring Affection (1992)[44]
• We Got A Date (1989); Can’t Take Johnny to the Funeral (1991) as part of Goat island Performance Group[45][46][47][48][49][50][51]

• Flinders Island Artist Residency (2016-2017)
• Platte Forum Creative Residency (2013)[52]
• University of Denver (DU) (2008-2012) Fellowship[53]
• DU Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Graduate Writing Scholar (2009-2010)
• Crosscut Award (2007)[54]
• Illinois Arts Council Project Grant (2006)
• Columbia College Faculty Development Award m(2006)
• Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs commission (2005)
• Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2004)
• Illinois Arts Council Project Grant (2002)
• Richard H. Dreihaus Individual Artist Award, the Richard Dreihaus Foundation, Nomination (2001)
• Cal Arts/ Alpert Award in the Arts, Nomination (2001)
• Columbia College Excellence in Teaching Award (2000)[55]

Beginning in 1989 and continuing until early 1997, Dickinson worked at Randolph Street Gallery (RSG), the erstwhile alternative arts space in Chicago (1979-1998). Initially, Dickinson was a member of the committee responsible for performance programming (called “Time Arts” at RSG) under the direction of Mary Jo Schnell along with Peter Taub, the Executive Director of the gallery. From 1993 and until her resignation, Dickinson was the Director of Time Arts.[56][57]

In addition to Time Arts programming, and what are now called “relational” art events (including the Grotto d’Amore––a fund-raiser cum ceremonial happening wherein same-sex couples and groups, inter and intra species companions, and lovers of the incarcerated could marry and divorce in a single night), Dickinson’s work, in tandem with the Time Arts Programming Committee and RSG Staff members, included the design and implementation of several public art projects beginning in 1989 with the first Day without Art events in collaboration with Encarnacion Teruel and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum (now called the National Museum of Mexican Art), the University of Illinois with Matthew Owens, and, with Nathan Mason, the First Presbyterian Church. On December 1, 2, and 3 of that year, portraits of people living with AIDS were projected at locations throughout Chicago: the ballroom of the museum, the student union of the university, and outdoors against the walls of the church on Michigan Avenue’s Gold Coast.

• www.thearchitectureofhoney.com
• www.thedreamoftheowlsisters.org