For Mark Dion’s Art, a Permanent Place to Call Home

This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world stretching boundaries with new artists, new audiences and new technology.

The artist Mark Dion stood in the hallway of a three-story house in Troy Hill in Pittsburgh recently, ruminating on what was about to become a unique home for his wildly unusual array of creations.

From 1956 through 2018, the modest house in a working-class neighborhood belonged to the Christopher family. But after the matriarch, Margaret Christopher, died in 2017, it was offered by her two sons to Evan Mirapaul, a philanthropic art collector and local resident.

Over the past two years, the house was gutted, rebuilt and meticulously transformed into a permanent installation to showcase Dion’s work, which opens to the public on Saturday.

It combines the Massachusetts native’s fascination with obsessive collecting, ordering and the preservation of things, with questions over how natural history is understood in the Western world.

Mrs. Christopher’s House is the fourth art house in the Troy Hill Art Houses series, a project led by Mirapaul, 65, whose inspiration, he said, came from a trip he took in 2007 when he visited repurposed homes on the island of Naoshima in Japan.

Dion, 63, is no stranger to fleeting art exhibitions. Over the past 30 years he has produced a glow-in-the-dark pack-rat skeleton sculpture for the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum in Los Angeles; bears in caves in the remote Norwegian mountainside; and an enormous fish fountain in the coastal town of Stavoren, the Netherlands.