Betty Beaumont (born January 8, 1946) is a Canadian-American site-specific and conceptual installation artist, sculptor, and photographer. She is an internationally recognized artist known to explore cross-disciplinary media, interweaving the environmental, social, economic, political, and the architectural. Beaumont lives and works in New York City.
Beaumont's diverse body of work challenges global social awareness, as well as socioeconomic and ecological practices. Beaumont is involved with investigating solution-based sustainability strategies that reflect contemporary, historic, and cultural perspectives and environmental and social conditions.
One of Beaumont's most notable works is the environmental installation Ocean Landmark (1978-1980), a grand-scale underwater project. The installation consists of 17,000 neutralized coal fly-ash blocks strategically submerged three miles off Fire Island National Seashore to lay on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, creating an artificial habitat for marine life.
Early life and education
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Beaumont emigrated with her family to Los Angeles at an early age. She attended California State University, Northridge where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1969. Beaumont earned her master's degree from College of Environmental Design in the School of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972 before moving to Chicago and then to New York City in 1973, where she currently resides. In 1976, Beaumont built a film set for Andy Warhol at The Factory, worked part-time with filmmaker Barbara Kopple, and danced at Brooklyn Academy of Music with Twyla Tharp in Half the Hundreds, as well as Anna Halprin at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Work
Beaumont has described art as central to shaping the world. "[Art] asks questions, provokes imagination and presents new paradigms for thought and meaning. The flow from the specific, concrete, and technical, to the abstract, meditative and lyrical characterizes my work."
Beaumont's work questions and seeks to bring awareness to various worldviews and perspectives, often through the lens of the shared human frameworks of language, image, and object.
Many of her projects contain bodies of work in themselves, as she continues to return to contemporary questions that provoke her to expand on these threads of ideas using new technological tools.
Works 1969–1980
While a graduate student at the School of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Beaumont documented the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill through a series of black and white photographs called Steam Cleaning The Santa Barbara Shores… Her photographs captured the destruction of the shoreline ecosystem by the power washing oil from the rocks with high-pressure steam hoses.
The image is partnered with a work from 2001 entitled Timeline of Global Oil Spills 1960-2004, a stark black and white pigment print that graphically lists the many major global oil spills in a poetic timeline.
Her earliest work paralleled the growth of the West Coast women's art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Time spent living in the high desert mesas with the Native American Hopi led her to an exploration of society's interactions with nature and the environment. In the early 70s she began a series of site-specific outdoor installations, which sought to re-establish a relationship between people and their environment and were inspired in part by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.
In 1977, Beaumont created Cable Piece, forming an enormous iron ring of 4,000 feet of cable measuring 100 feet in diameter, which was left to bury itself slowly in the ground on a farm in Macomb, Illinois. The rust content of the ring affected the growth pattern of the soil, over time transforming the metal ring into a lush grass circle. The ring configuration suggested technological and mythological connections with the Fermi Laboratory, a neutron accelerator plant located nearby, and Native American burial and ceremonial mounds of the Midwest.