Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld

I recently attended the opening of Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum, at the University of Miami, FL, where it will be on view through July 20, 2025. This wonderful exhibition is the first two-person exhibition of these closely allied artists, offering a compelling tour through their celebrated careers and into the shadowy depths of the threatened natural world.

The first two-person exhibition of these celebrated artists, Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld explores their shared allegiances and sustaining friendship over a period of three decades. Maintaining singular stylistic voices, both Dion and Rockman have achieved international prominence for their own distinctive practices, while their creative and intellectual trajectories have evolved in tandem and often intersected. Together they have embarked on tropical expeditions; published dialogues; and co-edited the pioneering 1996 book Concrete Jungle, on anthropogenic ecosystems. Each has probed our strained relationship with the environment and the consequences of reigning ideologies about nature. Dion and Rockman were among the earliest artists to address, and even anticipate, the epic ecological problems we now face. Indeed, their vision has become increasingly urgent in this time of environmental collapse.

Uniting some twenty-five sculptures and paintings by both artists along with selected works on paper and a major new collaborative piece, this exhibition offers an absorbing journey into the depths of the threatened natural world.

Although working in different media, Dion and Rockman engage a number of like approaches and strategies, including intensive research and fieldwork; borrowing scientific methodology and models; and the use of allegory, dark humor, and popular culture tropes. Both artists employ methods of display found in museums of art and natural history, institutions of alleged authority and objectivity, which they slyly subvert in their works. While Dion’s preferred museological modes are taxidermy dioramas and specimen cabinets, Rockman revels in large-scale landscape paintings, densely populated and replete with didactic keys. Like natural history displays and wildlife illustrations, their works are grounded in science and close observation, but presented in a rhetorical, or even theatrical, manner.

The concept of “underworld” in the exhibition’s title encompasses several germane associations, including the mythic abode of the dead, archaeology, the Earth’s subsurface, and elements of criminality or vice. Within the context of Dion’s and Rockman’s oeuvres, the notion also incorporates unconscious beliefs about nature, invisible micro and macro dimensions, and deep denial of our culture’s harmful course. In the past two decades, during which the environmental crisis has escalated, both artists have expressed increasing pessimism and melancholy about our ecological fate. This gloom has not proved stifling, however, and Dion and Rockman continue to hone creative tactics for staging both the wonder and woe of nature’s condition.

The exhibition feels like a voyage of discovery through various pressing subjects, with the artists’ works serving as enticing guides. Beginning with a section evoking the fieldwork of pioneering naturalists and explorers, visitors encounter field-station tableaux by Dion alongside Rockman’s paintings of fauna and dramatic terrains, often with cross-sectioned views. Ensuing works address such themes as invasive and endangered species, beleaguered aquatic environments, anthropogenic landscapes, and future scenarios evincing effects of climate change and waning biodiversity.

An exhibition highlight is the debut of a grand sculptural diorama, titled American Landscape, created especially for the tour and marking an unprecedented collaboration between Dion and Rockman. This zoological group portrait, set on a golf course, features a cast of scrappy species that, according to the artists, successfully “exploit niches and opportunities generated by a human-transformed landscape” representing “the future global ecosystem.” The exhibition also includes a selection of related drawings and prints by both Dion and Rockman. In addition, participating museums have the option of developing, along with the artists, an adjunct “Chamber of Wonders” display, conceived as a flexible cabinet of curiosities intended to inspire both awe and concern about the natural world. One of the ephemera that caught my attention was Mark Dion’s Decomposition Books, full of his field notes.

Anke Van Wagenberg, PhD, is Senior Curator & Head of International Collaborations at the American Federation of Arts in New York and lives in Talbot County, MD

The accompanying 120-page catalog, Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld, written by Suzanne Ramljak, with contributions by Lucy R. Lippard and Patrick Jaojoco, was published by the American Federation of Arts and Hirmer Publishers.

The exhibition was organized by the American Federation of Arts and has toured at the Bruce Museum (Greenwich, CT, 2023), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia Beach, VA, 2024), and The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore (Saratoga Springs, NY, 2025-2025). The tour will conclude at the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State (University Park, PA, August 23 – December 7, 2025).