Joan Dickinson is an American artist working in interrelated forms including visual and performance art, writing and translation, photography, farming and environmental restoration, and teaching. Through these varying forms Dickinson conducts collaborative investigations into language, media, and cross-disciplinary elements that explore the confluences of home and land, autobiography as a resistance to history, encounters with site and weather, the sky, other worlds, and bodies.
Biography
Education and Teaching
Dickinson has been a teacher for over twenty-five years serving as both faculty member and visiting artist at various art schools, colleges, and universities; and in writing centers with diverse populations , American culinary students, self-identified learning disabled students, and homeless women. A first generation college graduate, Dickinson holds a doctorate from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver.
Creative Practice
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, the Théatre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels, Belgium, PS 122 in NYC, Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California, and in Chicago: the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Randolph Street Gallery, the Lurie Garden at Millennium Park, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the State of Illinois Museum.
Goat Island Retrospective/Exhibition + Performances + Symposium
Beginning in 1989 and continuing until early 1997, Dickinson worked at Randolph Street Gallery, the erstwhile alternative arts space in Chicago. Initially, Dickinson was a member of the committee responsible for performance programming 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. In addition to Time Arts programming, and what are now called “relational” art events, 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, 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.
