Miss began experimenting with what later became known as Land Art. “This piece happens when you get there & stand in front of it,” art critic and curator Lucy Lippard, another core member of the Heresies Collective, wrote about the 1973 Battery Park Landfill project, “as the modestly sized holes are perceived, they expand into an immense interior space...the plank fences become what they are — not the sculpture but the vehicle for the experience of the sculpture, which in fact exists in this air, or rather in distance crystalized.” 

Then, Miss did something different: She made a sculpture in the earth that one looked at from above. As if to defy expectations, she began building towers and decoys of playful proportions, and the single objects that we were once asked to consider became large structures that required us to rediscover how to inhabit them. Art critic Rosalind Krauss describes this shift in Miss’s work to articulate a new consideration of sculpture's interdisciplinary nature, between architecture and landscape, in her seminal 1979 essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field. That same year, Miss participated in Robert Morris’s design symposium Earthworks: Land Reclamation as Sculpture, sponsored by the Kings County Arts Commission, which proposed creating large scale sculptures that use the earth as a medium to rehabilitate technologically abused land. By involving contemporary artists in land reclamation, the King County Arts Commission took an approach that no governmental agency had yet attempted on any significant scale.

In her landmark 1986 essay, “A Redefinition of Public Art,” Miss wrote, “art must be experienced directly.” Discovering what direct experience is has been the focus of much of Miss’s work, an expedition from representations of spaces that appear familiar but are beguiling, to landscapes where a narrative is unearthed, and finally to spaces in which the viewer participates in determining what the experience and meaning might be. 

Reading Lippard on Miss’s 1973 temporary installation, Battery Park Landfill, is remarkable, and her insights are ever pertinent. When Miss returned to Battery Park City to build the South Cove viewing platform — a landmark of collaboration between artists and the public — the intention was to make the water more accessible to people living in lower Manhattan. Even as Miss’s work developed, as her sculptures dug down, built up, and rearranged space, her work always needed participation, a component of experience. As such, it feels natural for Miss, as her work has expanded beyond New York studios and galleries, beyond the lawns of college campuses, into huge expenses – subway stations, abandoned rail yards, the White River Watershed, the Broadway Corridor – that participation in the work would need to be bigger and more direct as well.

Mary Miss conceived of City as Living Laboratory as a forum to make rich opportunities for public participation in art and design, in our infrastructure and our ecology. In her upcoming book, she identifies six projects from 2001 to when she founded CALL in 2008, as the groundwork for City as Living Lab: Moving Perimeter; Santa Fe Railyard Park; Arlington County Water Pollution Plant; Orange County Great Park: Park as Living Laboratory; Connect the Dots; Roshanara’s Net.

Mary Miss has lived in New York, a city of strangers constantly crossing paths, since 1969, and the flow of the city has shaped her work. In her 2002 proposal Moving Perimeter: a Wreath for Ground 0, she explores how to integrate separate paths into a pattern. 

As Miss passed through the Ground Zero checkpoints, she saw the new reality of post 9/11 New York: Large areas had become inaccessible, the border around them periodically shifting. Thousands of people started tracing that border, transforming Ground Zero into a fluid pilgrimage site, a wreath of mourning. Working with architects Victoria Marshall and Elliott Maltby, Miss recognized the perimeter of Ground Zero as a site for a collaborative installation. 

Small interventions would appear at first: ∞ painted at key intersections, existing barriers and fences painted blue. Then new moveable forms would be introduced: fragments of fencing, seating, plantings, and blue lights – whose presence would become apparent as the area of exclusion diminished in size. The site was a density of moveable pieces, a coalescence of separate parts. 

Those structures would define a space to mourn, a wreath for flowers, candles, and notes. These tokens, our public shrine, would invite us to mourn together and at the same time introduce color and life, while the moving perimeter would allow for visual access to the reconstruction, transforming mourning into recovery. 

Santa Fe Railyard Park, 2002 - 2008

The Sante Fe Railyard Project, a 13-acre park built on the site of an abandoned rail yard, was the result of a 20-year, community-initiated urban redevelopment effort to reconnect neighborhoods that had been previously separated by the industrial site. The park provides a pedestrian link to downtown Santa Fe. Miss was familiar with the landscape from her childhood visits and assumed an active role in the site's design. Working with landscape architect Ken Smith and architect Fred Schwarts, Miss intertwined the diverse narratives and histories of the site with those who would use it. 

The design elements and materials speak to an aspect of the site’s history and use, especially water, which plays a major role in the design of the park. A blue water tank hangs above the site and rainwater, which is stored through the hardscape and surrounding roofs, is circulated throughout the park, watering the native plants. Thus, using water storage and distribution techniques that have been used in New Mexico for hundreds of years, the park becomes an oasis for the local community. A series of circular areas defined by stones, wooden walls, or trellises recall the circular irrigated fields seen from the air, as well as the underground chambers of Native American architecture.

The Arlington County Water Pollution Plant Master Plan, 2003 - 2005

proposal

The Arlington County Water Pollution Plant Master Plan (ACWPCP) proposes to make visible the invisible, to connect the daily lives of Arlington’s inhabitants to the Chesapeake Bay, where their sewage flows. 

The plant itself, a massive 35-acre site, is a major feature in the landscape. The proposal contains two main objectives: 1) to educate the public about the sewage treatment, demystifying the process with a black and white line extending throughout the plant grounds; and 2) to create a full-scale diagram that leads visitors visually and physically from one step in the process to the next. The steps in the water treatment would be marked by large numbers with corresponding kiosks whose forms and sizes echo that of the actual pipes. 

Miss envisions using the “in between” spaces of the plant – the surrounding walkways, fences, and even the plant buildings – as places of engagement and recreation, not unlike those envisioned in Moving Perimeter. She has designed an ecosystem that utilizes the dead spaces created by the treatment plant to then support the plant, adapting roofs, grounds, and roadways with plant screens that assist in cooling in the summer and insulating in the winter, and that collect clean rainwater runoff. Rain gardens also collect water. The living surfaces are not limited to plant life: permeable surfaces, such as grass, gravel, and crushed oyster shells help stormwater management. Solar panels that encircle the perimeter provide supplemental power. Miss uses the design to support the function of the structure.

It takes more than placards and photographs to understand our environment and to strengthen our relationship to it. The process of learning must be integrated in our daily lives, in the infrastructure that sustains contemporary life, in order for our responsibilities for the future to be fully embraced.

Orange County Great Park, Park as Living Lab, 2005

proposal

Nineteenth century urban parks were conceived of as redemptive oases, the lungs of congested cities – places for pleasure and activity, as well as quiet reflection. In our own time, city parks offer more than relief from urban life, they offer new ways to think about the interface between the human and natural world. Park as Living Laboratory is a program that explores that critical interface. It creates opportunities to ask a fundamental question, the most urgent of our time: How can individuals understand their roles in sustaining the fragile environment in which they live? 

Mary Miss developed Park as Living Laboratory during the master planning for the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California. Miss and landscape architect Ken Smith were principal designers of the competition-winning scheme for the 1,300-acre park. The team included environmental ecologists Steven Handel, architect Enrique Norton, landscape architect Mia Lehrer, environmental engineers Buro Happold and Fuscoe Engineering. 

Artists will lead the effort to establish Park as a Living Laboratory, using art to make abstract ideas experiential and to awaken curiosity about energy, water, history, and social interactions. Experimental in nature, the program will evolve over time. All communities will have an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the spirit of a place and to assume responsibility for its stewardship.

A Research and Residency Center is central to the Park as Living Laboratory program: It will be a place where artists can collaborate and engage with botanists, hydrologists, biologists, social scientists, environmental ecologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. Through these collaborations, artists will be able to investigate issues such as storm water run-off, to design ways to demonstrate different types of alternative energy in the park, or to engage people in a public space who have not been previously accommodated.  The work might take the form of prototypes, temporary installations, as well as permanent works. 

Over time, Park as Living Laboratory was to become a place where something new is always expected, where the future is envisioned.

Connect the Dots, Boulder, Colorado, 2007

Connect the Dots in Boulder Colorado was a mapping project that made visible the flow and change of the geography. The project retold the story of the 1894 flood, an event outside of contemporary memory or experience, which inundated the city of Boulder, causing widespread damage. There is a 0.1 percent chance of a 100-year flood any given year, and a 0.2 percent of a 500 year flood occurring. It is even possible that those two floods could occur in the same year. New weather patterns make the forecasting of such events less predictable, however. The city of Boulder is located at the mouth of Boulder Canyon.  Because of its location, the nature of the steep slopes and long approach upstream, the city is highly susceptible to flooding and is considered to be a high-hazard zone where the question is not if there will be a flood but when it will happen.

Connect the Dots brought the historic hazard back to present consciousness. 

Using blue circular markers attached to trees and fences and important buildings in the floodplain, such as the Boulder Municipal Building and Boulder High school, to demonstrate the height of the water during the 500 year flood, Connect the Dots helps us imagine the catastrophic event. 

To more fully reveal the nature and history of Boulder’s creeks floods, setting areas were created adjacent to the creeks, each focusing on single aspects of the creek. Steps and stairs along the creeks were marked to show seasonal water level changes.

Connect the Dots was not only focused on the flooding but considered how information about hazards can be communicated. A fully implemented project would deal with these points and others in detail; it would be an ongoing collection of information from experts in the field as well as from the residents of Boulder.

Roshanara’s Net, New Dehli, India, 2008

Looking at issues of sustainability, it is important to consider issues large and small, global and local. Roshanara’s Net focused on local issues – the health and well being of the individuals and their communities. At the 2008 48°C Public.Art.Ecology. Festival in New Delhi, India, Miss was invited to explore the relationship between sustainability, urban ecology, and community awareness. Set in the abandoned archeological site of Roshanara’s Tomb, Miss investigated how the park could become significant to the adjacent community, a community of textile workers who have suffered from New Delhi’s ineffective clean air policies. 

The project took the form of a temporary garden in the patterns of textiles and rugs full of medicinal plants. One hundred diamond-shaped units made up of evenly spaced orange pipes covered the grounds of a seventeenth-century Mughal pavilion in a city park in Delhi. At the center of each unit was a tin sheet outlined in blue pipes containing the name of one of the medicinal plants with text in Hindi and English describing its use. Looking out over the earthen surface of the park paved with orange and blue linear elements, patterns became visible. 

The garden is then extended beyond the boundaries of Roshanara’s Tomb.  A quarter-mile of fence along the park's eastern perimeter was wrapped with a band of orange cloth naming the medicinal trees in English and Hindi to be found in the park. Inside the park itself those trees were banded and named with the same material. Three “Portable Parks” – wheeled carts carrying medicinal plants – were transported around the neighborhood to announce the times and dates when Ayurvedic specialists would be speaking at the garden, where 2000 plants lined the base of the pavilion.

Thus, a new set of connections was made between Roshanara’s tomb and the neighborhood surrounding it, as if a temporary net had been cast over the two.

Mary Miss concluded her 1982 essay “A Redefinition of Public Sculpture” by positing that the shift in public sculpture from monolith to work for the public “is that the artist is interested in attempting a dialogue with the public [...] there is an effort being made to establish an accessible visual language.” This dialogue has been crafted throughout Miss’s career, beginning with her smaller sculptural works which invite the viewer to spend a moment longer considering the built environment, to her land art, which provide opportunities for viewers to access the land in ways that had been impossible, such as approaching the Hudson from downtown and taking the time to turn around and see the city from that different vantage point. In her six groundwork projects, Miss insists that this dialogue precede the planning and building of public art. With each project, the result is not simply a beautiful park or place to mourn, but a space for the public to gather, challenge their assumptions, and learn together. This is the framework for City as Living Laboratory.