Chair, Interdisciplinary Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art
MFA, San Francisco Art Institute
BA, San Diego State University, with honors, with distinction in art
Eve Andrée Laramée was born in Los Angeles, and divides her time between Brooklyn, NY, Baltimore, MD, and Santa Fe, NM. Her sculptures, installations and works on paper have been exhibited throughout the United States and in Europe, including exhibitions in New York, England, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, Holland, Israel, China, Japan, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Mass MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; among other institutions. Her current projects include an installation and book about the transformation of the Salton Sea/Mojave Desert during the Cold War, and a project on water contaminated by radioactive isotopes in New Mexico. Her visual musical score based on gravity anomalies was performed by musical ensembles in Shanghai, China and Hamburg, Germany. Her work has been featured in Weather Report: Art and Climate Change, curated by Lucy Lippard, at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is included in the collections of the MacArthur Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, and in numerous others.
She has received grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts in Performance Art, Multidisciplinary Works, and Emerging Art. Laramée has received regional grants from the Mid-Atlantic States Arts Foundation in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Matters, Inc, the Shifting Foundation and the New Mexico Arts Council. The sculptor was named the Guggenheim Museum Sculptor-in-Residence in 1992. She has received three residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (2001, 2003, and 2004), and residencies at the John Michael Kohler Art Center, Pilchuck School for Glass, UrbanGlass NYC, and Art Omi, among others.
She is the Chair of Interdisciplinary Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and has taught sculpture and critical theory at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Rhode Island School of Design, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Fairfield University.
Halfway to Invisible, an installation by Eve Andrée Laramée, raises questions about the environmental legacy of uranium mining for atomic weapons and nuclear power, and its biological impact on the peoples of the American West. Between 1949 and 1989, uranium mines in the Western United States produced more than 225,000,000 tons of uranium ore. This activity affected a large number of Native American nations, including the Navajo, Laguna, Zuni, Southern Ute, Ute Mountain, Hopi, Acoma and other Pueblo cultures.
During the "Uranium Boom" in the Grants area of New Mexico, many of these peoples worked in the 1,200 uranium mines. Others worked locally in the almost 4,000 mines, mills and processing plants in the Four Corners region (where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado converge). These workers were not only poorly paid, they were seldom informed of the dangers of working with uranium nor were they given appropriate protective gear. Due to the Cold War demand for increasingly destructive and powerful nuclear weapons, these laborers were both exposed to and brought home (in the form of dust on their clothing and skin) large amounts of radiation.
Epidemiologic studies of the families of these workers have shown increased incidents of radiation-induced cancers, miscarriages, cleft palates and other birth defects. The government, mine owners, scientific and health communities were all well aware of the hazards of working with radioactive materials at this time. Diseases related to working in the mines include cancers of the lung, bone, stomach, brain and skin, as well as kidney and liver damage. After the mills were closed and torn down, some of the local people in the area used the contaminated rebar-reinforced concrete debris to build foundations for their houses, as these materials were left lying out in the open land. Uranium mining is one of many issues surrounding the environmental and health impact of atomic weapons and nuclear power. Others include the research, production and testing of atomic weapons, as well as the storage of waste from nuclear reactors.
These stories of our atomic legacy should not remain buried in the deserts of the Southwest, but rather be discussed in numerous venues by a wide range of individuals. We must question how "Atomic Age" events may have influenced evolutionary processes and produced genetic casualties in these communities caught in the crossfire of atomic war. Halfway to Invisible does not seek to propose a pat answer, conclusion or solution to these complex problems; rather, it proposes these questions: Is our atomic legacy producing genotoxic effects in indigenous human populations? If so, what is the extent of DNA damage, and how might this affect these populations in the future?
Laramee describes her interest in art and science as follows: "I am interested in the ways in which cultures use science and art as devices or maps to construct belief systems about the natural world. I try to draw attention to areas of overlap and interconnection between artistic exploration and scientific investigation, and to the slippery human subjectivity underlying both processes. Through my work I speculate on how human beings contemplate and consider nature through both art and science in a way that embraces poetry, contradiction and metaphor."
For over twenty years Laramée has explored the mutable, triadic relationship between art, science, and nature. She will create an exhibition in the Emory Visual Arts Gallery based on themes from the symposium. Evolution in relation to the history of science and art - areas of overlap and interconnection between artistic exploration and scientific investigation – has long been an area of interest for the artist. Her work incorporates sculpture, installation, time-based media, photography and writing. Her project about the use of language and metaphor in Darwin's writings is in the American Philosophical Society Museum in Philadelphia. This commission is an opportunity to look broadly at the theme of evolution and develop work about newer understandings of, and approaches to evolution.