ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum presents an exhibition of the work of artist Don ZanFagna, on view from Friday, October 21, through Sunday, November 20, 2011.
Since the 1950s, Don ZanFagna has been creating stunning works that examine the creative potential of ecological design. Manifested through extensive journals, drawings, collages, and architectural models, his work combines environmental consciousness, technological savvy, and utopian spirit. His works have been presented at internationally renowned museums such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
ZanFagna's Aspen Art Museum exhibition features selections from his Pulse Domes (1975-79) series: vividly imaginative drawings of homes created, constructed, and maintained entirely with organic processes. The designs presented here are similar to, yet predate, other self-sustaining research environments like Biosphere 2 in Arizona (1987-1991). Deeply interested in the rapid technological changes taking place in the 1960s and 70s—when everything from space exploration, robotics, personal computing, and biological research underwent radical upheaval—ZanFagna’s works are, in retrospect, eerily prescient.
Pioneering for his interests in sustainable and environmentally sound practices, ZanFagna founded CEASE (Center for Ecological Action to Save the Environment), and was a speaker, along with Ralph Nader, Margaret Mead, and numerous other ecological activists, at New York’s first Earth Day Teach-In at Union Square in New York in 1970.
Don ZanFagna was born in Saunderstown, Rhode Island in 1929. He holds advanced degrees from the Universities of Michigan and Southern California in Painting, Art, and Architecture. He received a Fulbright/Italian Government Grant for study in Italy 1956-57. During the 1970s and 80s he held the Department Chair in Art at Rutgers University and was sought after to lecture in ecological design. He was visiting Eco-Architecture Professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY. His work is represented in private collections and has been exhibited in over 200 museums in the U.S. and Europe.
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