Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1961. He earned a BFA in 1986 and an honorary doctorate in 2003 from the University of Hartford School of Art, Connecticut and an MFA from School of Visual Arts, New York in 1986. Dion has participated in many one person and group exhibitions and his work is represented in the collections of national museums and those abroad. A notable commissioned work is his permanent outdoor installation and learning lab at the Olympic Sculpture Park, made for the Seattle Art Museum. Dion has often focused his artistic investigations on the complex history of the representation of nature, the practice of archeology and the culture of collecting. The forms of his projects are diverse and include architectural scale public works, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and photography.
Mark Dion's project for Neiman Center, Scala Natura, is the artist's play on the notion of a hierarchy of life forms running through the canon of western philosophy. His visual chart borrows widely from the history of western image making and scientific illustration. Dion playfully adds a row of objects of industry, art and culture to the final row of the chart, displacing humans from their position at the apex of the great chain.
