Location: Orinda, CA
Medium: Installation, Performance, Sculpture
Born in Fort Sill, Oklahoma in 1950, Mark Thompson later spent part of his childhood on family land in Orinda, California. After earning his degree from UC Berkeley in 1973, he began keeping honeybees as research for a film/performance titled Immersion (1973–76), in which he sat on a 14-foot tower on family property in the East Bay and let a swarm of roughly 40,000 bees gradually cover his head and torso. The piece set the template for a practice built around sustained, unhurried fieldwork with bees, water, and other elemental forces, carried out with a naturalist’s patience as much as an artist’s.
In 1986, Thompson joined the founding generation of resident artists at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, alongside David Ireland and Ann Hamilton, and later partnered with Ireland on the hand-labor of stripping and sealing the walls of the main Headlands building. In 1987 he collaborated with dancer Joanna Haigood on The Keeping of Bees Is Like the Directing of Sunshine at Headlands, sealing the gym’s windows in beeswax and releasing a queen bee — and the swarm following her — from Haigood’s hair as she leapt from a window mid-performance. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, his bee- and water-based installations traveled internationally: A House Divided (1989) tracked wild honeybees on both sides of the Berlin Wall and combined East and West German beeswax into window panels at Künstlerhaus Bethanien months before reunification; Spring House (1989) sealed an abandoned pump house at Artpark in Lewiston, New York, letting a stream fill it and drain out into the Niagara River; and Invocations (1990) installed a beeswax tomb and bull skeleton filled with live bees in London.
In 1999, curator Renny Pritikin paired Thompson with the younger Bay Area duo Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin for The Boy Mechanic at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — an installation centered on Thompson’s childhood acre in Orinda that combined a working beehive, a beeswax-and-bedsheet zeppelin, wooden recreations of long-gone trees, and objects built from suggestions in the vintage Boy Mechanic books that shaped his boyhood interest in flight and invention. Thompson taught sculpture for decades at California College of the Arts (formerly California College of Arts and Crafts), where he was named Professor Emeritus in 2021. He returned to Headlands in 2023 for Semaphore, a 40th-anniversary installation revisiting Immersion and the Haigood collaboration through beeswax, sound, and video — after the National Park Service declined to permit live bees on site a second time.
Thompson’s real medium, more than any material, is duration: befriending a colony’s rhythms takes years, whether that means the 10-to-12-feet-per-hour pace he kept while walking a backpack hive through rural Northern California and Japan (retracing routes associated with the itinerant poet Bashō), or the three weeks he spent “lining” bees across Cold War Berlin to trace a hive on the East side. Beeswax — gathered and blended from multiple, often politically loaded sources — became both his primary sculptural material and his central metaphor: a substance built collectively, indifferent to the property lines and political borders that divide the humans who keep the bees. He has described watching a swarm converge in flight as revealing something like “what holds everything together.” That combination of citizen-science rigor (a personal library on bee biology, methodical tracking of wild hives) and unguarded wonder has kept him equally at home in university sculpture studios, ecological-art surveys, and the Bay Area conceptual-art lineage running through David Ireland and the early Headlands generation.
Profile compiled from publicly available sources for the Bay Area Artist Wiki.