Since the late 1960s Mary Miss has shaped landscape and everyday materials into sculptures that invite exploration and erase boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture and fine art. Miss will discuss her work in a lecture titled “Thick Space” at 5:30 p.m. Monday, March 12, in Ken Shollmier Lecture Hall, located on the first floor of Vol Walker Hall. Cosponsored by the University of Arkansas School of Architecture and the department of art in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, the lecture is free and open to the public.

Mary Miss developed Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1989 — 96) for the Des Moines Art Center.

Miss is currently collaborating with Marlon Blackwell, a UA professor of architecture, and landscape architect Ed Blake, a former John G. Williams Visiting Professor at the University of Arkansas, on the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art + Nature Park for the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Miss has designed a 2,000-foot-long steel and steel mesh bridge that will link the museum campus with the new sculpture park, an amphitheater and the city trail system. Parts of the walkway are embedded in the earth, while others soar 25’ above the landscape; elevated gardens are incorporated into the design.

“The bridge fuses nature and art and will function as an extended sensory threshold to the park,” said Marlon Blackwell. The museum hopes to break ground on the project late this year.

Miss’ earliest work was modest in scale but grand in its intention to extend public art beyond merely decorative status. Miss eschewed the dense theorizing favored by minimalist and conceptual artists of the time in favor of direct experience: a sticky, tar-covered cone invited touch; a hillside field of 7-foot-high poles strung with rope drew viewers into an exploration of form. Critic Joseph Giovannini noted that she “sowed the seeds of a public art that did not demand insider knowledge, but simply the sensory apparatus of the average individual.”

Later works have been more complex but continue to engage the viewer. For example, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (1978) presented three towers at varying scales, two earth mounds and an underground courtyard with inaccessible spaces, challenging viewers to construct their own experiences at the four-acre site. Whether located in the urban bustle of New York City’s Battery Park or the remote reaches of a Finnish pine forest, Miss’ work is intended to be a forum for the imagination: “I’m still most interested in representing the experience of interior life in the public realm,” she said.

Miss is also noted for her photographs of sites and structures encountered on walking treks in various parts of the world and a film, Cut-off (1975), which focused on the interaction between landscape, viewer and set. She earned a bachelor of arts degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1966 and completed a master of fine arts degree at the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Maryland Art Institute, Baltimore, in 1968. She currently lives in New York City. Her work has been widely exhibited and documented, most recently in a 2004 monograph, Mary Miss, published by Princeton Architectural Press