MICHELE OKA DONER

While all her work can be said to derive from a fascination with a single subject—the formal vocabularies afforded by perceiving the natural world—Michele Oka Doner’s practice is wide-ranging, encompassing sculpture, costume and set design, printmaking, video, artist books, and public art in a career that spans five decades. Considering herself a “hunter-gatherer,” she is interested in both micro and macroscopic scales, making work that often references the body hybridized with other growth patterns found in the biosphere, or utilizes the repetition of these forms to integrate art and design—even occasionally producing functional objects. Early on she was one of the first artists to experiment with holography, producing a collaboration with physicist Lloyd Cross and sculptor Jerry Pethick that was subsequently exhibited at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1970 in what would become the first exhibition exclusively dedicated to holograms.

Upon moving to New York in 1981, Oka Doner began to pursue an interest in large-scale public art (although she prefers the term civic), and has since created more than 35 throughout the United States, including a 165 ft. long wall entitled Radiant Site installed in the 34th Street Herald Square subway station in NYC (1987), Flight at Washington’s Reagan International Airport, and most notably Walk on the Beach installed at Miami International Airport (1995-2000). This latter installation is seen by nearly 40,000,000 visitors each year and is one of the world’s largest, measuring one quarter of a mile long.