Patricia Johanson, an environmental artist who made nature her medium, transforming highway underpasses, sewage treatment plants and other grimly functional public spaces into sweeping art installations, died on Oct. 16 at her home in Buskirk, N.Y., northeast of Albany. She was 84.
The cause was congestive heart failure, her son Gerrit Goossen said.
Ms. Johanson started out as a minimalist painter and sculptor in the New York art world of the 1960s. But in the ’70s she turned her attention from the studio to the outside world, studying architecture so she could create large-scale works of landscape art that reintroduced nature to dismal urban spaces.
If painters throughout the centuries have used nature as subject matter, Ms. Johanson treated it as a canvas in its own right, going on to become a leader of what is known as the land art movement.
Her work may have been monumental in scale, but it was a pointed departure from the notable examples of earthworks art that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s — among them, Michael Heizer’s “Double Negative,” which required the use of dynamite and bulldozers to create two huge trenches in the Nevada desert.
Some of those works were “extremely destructive of the earth,” Ms. Johanson said in a 2003 interview with the Arts and Healing Network.
“Why interpret living nature if you can incorporate it intact?” she added. “Why bulldoze living communities on the assumption you can create something more significant than what is already there? Why not allow the earth to live, and let different people fulfill their own needs within works of art that are as open-ended and complex as nature itself?”
Her breakthrough project came in the early 1980s, when she was charged with restoring Fair Park Lagoon, a five-block-long, algae-choked pond in Dallas surrounded by museums and the Cotton Bowl stadium.
On her first visit to the site, a “green slime covered the water,” Ms. Johanson wrote on her website. “There was no food chain; there were hardly any plants, animals, or fish. Basically the lagoon was dead. People had no experience of the water except that a number of children had fallen in and drowned.”
Envisioning the pond as a living work of art, she brought in native plants not only for their beauty, but also to prevent further erosion and attract wildlife. She covered one end of the pond with a web of gunite paths inspired by the roots of the delta duck-potato plant. At the other end, she installed crisscrossing walkways — a native Texas fern provided the inspiration for these — creating islands and microhabitats for fish, waterfowl, turtles and fairy shrimp, later categorized as endangered.
“What I’ve been trying to do is dissolve the hierarchies and get everything on the same level — the art, the people, the plants, the soil, the water,” Ms. Johanson said of her work in an interview for the 2006 book “Art and Survival: Patricia Johanson’s Environmental Projects,” by Caffyn Kelley.
Ms. Johanson was similarly ambitious when, in 2003, she began reimagining a passage running under an eight-lane highway in Salt Lake City. She turned the walkway — which linked residential neighborhoods, a commercial strip and a popular park — into a miniature Utah canyon that would accommodate pedestrian traffic as well as floodwater runoff. The project, called “Draw at Sugar House,” combined local flora with sculptural elements, including a wall modeled on rock formations in Echo Canyon, about an hour away.
“Most of my designs are like a stew with many different ingredients,” she said in a 2012 interview with Land8, a landscape architecture site. “But in the end they all need to enhance the final result.”
Patricia Maureen Johanson was born on Sept. 8, 1940, in Brooklyn, the eldest of two daughters of Alvar Johanson, who designed missile-guidance systems for the Department of Defense, and Elizabeth (Deane) Johanson, a model with the John Robert Powers agency.
Growing up in the Highland Park neighborhood, she enjoyed spending time in the urban wildernesses of Central Park and Prospect Park and exploring the city’s art museums. The family eventually settled on Long Island, where she became a skilled clarinetist in the orchestra of Wellington C. Mepham High School, in North Bellmore. After graduating in 1958, she enrolled at Bennington College in Vermont, receiving a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 1962.
In the early years of her career, Ms. Johanson worked as an assistant to Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico and dreamed of mounting a one-woman show of her own. But her career took an unexpected turn in 1969, when House & Garden magazine commissioned her to design a garden.
Ms. Johanson made some 150 sketches for the project, writing essays and notes to explain her ideas. The project never came to fruition, but the exercise opened new artistic vistas.
“When I started exploring the landscape, I realized not only how complex it is, but how every element fed into every other element,” she said in a 2010 interview with the New Mexico public radio show “Santa Fe Radio Cafe.”
“If you’ve ever seen an old-fashioned pocket watch,” she added, “and you open up the back, it’s as if every gear is turning every other gear. So it isn’t a matter of isolating any one thing. It’s how the whole structure works together.”
This new undertaking required technical training, so she went back to school, earning a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the City College School of Architecture in New York in 1977.
She went on to create dozens of installations around the world, many on sites others might prefer to avoid.
For “Endangered Garden,” a project commissioned in 1987, she turned a sewage-treatment site on San Francisco Bay into a landscape with parkland and a sculptural concrete promenade inspired by the endangered San Francisco garter snake.
In 1999, she worked with an international team and the South Korean government to turn a 300-foot-high garbage dump outside Seoul into a park with terraced slopes, hiking trails, stairways and lookout points.
And in 2001, she transformed the Ellis Park sewage-treatment facility in Petaluma, Calif., into a sprawling preserve with natural systems that recycle water.
In addition to Mr. Goossen, Ms. Johanson is survived by two other sons, Alvar and Nathaniel Goossen, and three grandchildren. Her husband, the art critic, curator and professor Eugene Goossen, whom she married in 1974, died in 1997.
Ms. Johanson’s projects have been featured in more than 150 exhibitions, and her models are part of the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Incorporating natural imagery into the sculptural elements of those projects was crucial to her, even if some of the symbols she used — like the serpent in “Endangered Garden” — could evoke mixed reactions.
“I like snakes as a design motif,” she told Land8, “because they are so reflexively disliked by most people. For me it is a way of asking people to develop some understanding of the world and give everything its place. We can’t kill everything we fear or dislike.”
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