John Grade Press

WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

Natural Capital: John Grade’s Dazzling, Decomposing Artworks
by Anna Bruce-Lockhart, January 9, 2017

read full article (pdf)

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery Reopens With a New Focus
by Graham Bowley, November 12, 2015

WASHINGTON — The Renwick Gallery, housed in an ornate, 156-year-old confection here that was the first American building constructed as a public art museum, begins a new chapter in its history on Friday.

read full article (pdf)

SMITHSONIAN

The Renwick Renewed
by Alex Palmer, November 12, 2015

He wanted to bring a 40-foot tree into the gallery. He had just the tree in mind—a 150-year-old hemlock located in the Cascade Mountains (east of the artist’s Seattle home). About the same age as the Renwick itself, and a size that would just fit into the gallery space if hung parallel to the floor, the grand old hemlock was ideal for the site-specific project Grade had in mind.

read full article (pdf)

DESIGNBOOM

John Grade’s Capacitor moves and illuminates with weather data 
by Nina Azzarello, September 4, 2013

The artwork — whose coil configuration is influenced by organic and geometric forms found in nature — physically behaves according to accumulated statistics from a mechanized controller, amassing both current outdoor conditions and weather patterns from the past one hundred years. sending the information about change in wind intensity and temperature directly to the sculpture, the interactive art piece moves and changes in luminosity.

read full article (pdf)

THE SEATTLE TIMES

John Grade builds a soaring sculpture from the remains of an 1897 schooner
by Danny Gawlowski, October, 2012

Artist John Grade is repurposing the century-old Douglas fir salvaged from the sailing ship Wawona into a 65-foot tall sculpture for Museum of History and Industry’s new location on South Lake Union.

read full article (pdf)

AMERICAN CRAFT

John Grade: Engineering Entropy
by Suzanne Ramljak, October 2010

Grade’s outdoor works can be seen as variants of performance art, rather than as environmental or land art, to which they’re often compared. Instead of enlisting his own body as performer, he recruits his crafted surrogates to be ravaged by nature, and then presents the aftermath on public display.

read full article (pdf)

WHATCOM MUSEUM

Making Art New: Form and Process, Elephant Bed exhibition catalog
by Barbara Matilsky, April 2010

Floating inches below the surface of the sea are tiny micro-organisms called coccolithophores. Individually, they are too small to see, but grouped together they form such large masses that they can be seen from satellites blanketing hundreds of miles of ocean, coloring the water a bright turquoise.

read full article (pdf)

FABRICA

The Elephant Bed, Fabrica exhibition catalog
by Jonathan Swain, Jul/Aug 2009

Landscape is at the heart of John Grade’s work. Past projects have involved traveling across the vast wilderness of North and SOuth America and making degradable works in response to the environment.

read full article (pdf)

ARTWEEK

John Grade at the Bellevue Art Museum
by Elizabeth Pence, Dec/Jan 2008

Informed by the narratives of nature, Grade’s work is an interesting exploration of these ideas; each work included in this exhibition arrived in a different stage in its material process, where no single stage could be considered complete and final.

read full article (pdf)

SCULPTURE

John Grade: Lived History in Sculpture
by Suzanne Beal, December 2008

Grade created Host, only to have it picked apart by birds, digested, and deposited as waste. The approximately 13-foot wide telescoping sculpture of cast cellulose covered in ground seeds was situated in the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona.

read full article (pdf)