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. Never 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 by Johanson to light. They demonstrate the intimate progress of the artist's engagement with 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 in the 1960s. Her vision of a new modernity is still significant today.

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