An Interview with Patricia Johanson: Seeds of Creative Vision in Childhood Memories of Nature and the City

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 2014 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 24(3), 2014 An Interview with Patricia Johanson: Seeds of Creative Vision in Childhood Memories of Nature and the City Louise Chawla Environmental Design Program University of Colorado Boulder Citation: Chawla, Louise (2014). “An Interview with Patricia Johanson: Seeds of Creative Vision in Childhood Memories of Nature and the City.” Children, Youth and Environments 24(3): 92-101. Retrieved [date] from: http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=chilyoutenvi. Interview by Louise Chawla October 1, 2014 This interview with Patricia Johanson—artist, architect, landscape designer—took place when she visited Boulder, Colorado as a guest speaker at the University of Colorado and Naropa University. Johanson’s canvases, sculptures, and drawings are part of the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., as well as many other sites; but her vision and accomplishments spill beyond the walls of museums and galleries into the living worlds of nature and cities. Johanson equipped herself for her multifaceted work through a bachelor’s degree in fine art at Bennington College in Vermont, courses in architecture and civil engineering at the Spitzer School of Architecture in the City College of New York, and a master’s in art history at Hunter College. In the 1960s, long before the terms “biomimicry” or “biophilic design” had been invented, Johanson was exploring in her drawings how patterns in nature could inspire human constructions—such as regional planning, highway design, and public works for flood control and water treatment—while connecting people to the landscape through pathways for the personal discovery of nature’s diversity and complexity. Her large-scale linear sculptures, such as William Rush and Cyrus Field near her home in Buskirk, New York, or Nostoc II at the Storm King Art Center, are routes into the landscape, in continuous processes of change as their materials reflect nature’s daily and seasonal activity and transformation. An Interview with Patricia Johanson: Seeds of Creative Vision in Childhood Memories… 93 In 1978, an exhibit of Johanson’s drawings at a New York gallery caught the attention of Harry Parker, director of the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas. He asked her, “Can these be built?” and when she answered, “Yes, they can,” he commissioned her to restore Fair Park Lagoon in Fair Park, Dallas, near the city’s art museum, sculpture center, museum of natural science, and the Cotton Bowl Stadium. Using sculpted paths inspired by the patterns of a native Texas water plant and fern, she divided the lagoon into a variety of habitats for the restoration of aquatic plants. As the plants purified the water and attracted insects, native fish and turtles were introduced and water birds found homes. Now the lagoon is a magnet for visitors, who wander its paths into encounters with the water and its ecosystems. In other large projects in San Francisco and Petaluma, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; Scranton, Pennsylvania; and Ulsan Dragon Park and Millennium Park in Korea, Johanson has shown again and again how aesthetics, function and ecology can be fused by bringing together the practices of art, architecture, cultural history, landscape architecture, ecological restoration, engineering, and urban planning and design. Like elements of nature, human creations can do more than just one thing. She is currently working on the renewal of a flood plain zone in Brattleboro, Vermont. There are many published guides to Johanson’s work, including A Field Guide to Patricia Johanson’s Works by Sue Spaid (Contemporary Museum, 2012), Patricia Johanson and the Re-Invention of Public Environmental Art by Xin Wu (Ashgate Publishing, 2013), Patricia Johanson’s House and Garden Commission by Xin Wu (a two-volume set, Dumbarton Oaks, 2007), and Art and Survival by Caffyn Kelley (Islands Institute, 2006). Images of her work can be found at http://www.patriciajohanson.com. In this interview, Johanson relates how core elements of her work can be traced to her early childhood experiences in New York parks and museums—led in the beginning by her mother, who opened the doors...