[2] Beaumont is involved with investigating solution-based sustainability strategies[3] that reflect contemporary, historic, and cultural perspectives and environmental and social conditions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It began a collection, which culminated in a series of 116 hand-made paper works and collaboration with Hiroaki Sato who translated 9 months of autobiographical fragments.
After exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (1977) and Kyoto (1978), a collaboration with poet and linguist Kyoko Iriye that translated the found images into the closest Japanese language character.
The project culminated in a box set of paper works and a comprehensive artist's book, featuring English text by Beaumont translated into Japanese by Hiroaki Sato.
Her photographs of deserted and boarded houses surrounding Love Canal addressed the concepts of community identity, what "home" is to those dispossessed, and the reclamation of a history propelled by pollution and corporate neglect that sought for it to be erased.
Beaumont's Ocean Landmark (1978–80) was a $3 million project that was jointly sponsored by the US Department of Energy, The Smithsonian Institution, Bell Labs, Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, America the Beautiful Fund, Media Bureau, and in-kind contributions.
[7] She in turn proposed the concept of processing waste material into an underwater sculpture[8] that would function as an artificial reef that would create a place where people might come and fish.
[4] Although the grand-scale sculpture, strongly influenced by feminism, psychoanalysis, and cognition is not visible to viewers, the submersive installation of the project can be experienced through a VRML representation, produced by Beaumont and other participants in 2000, through New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).
Ocean Landmark is listed as a "fish haven" on the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) coastal navigational map and has received a volume of critical attention in publications and articles like Phaidon's Land and Environmental Art edited by Jeffrey Kastner, Art Press (1987), Heresies Magazine (1988), and The Wall Street Journal (1990) among others.
These ambitious and extensively researched combined-media installations deal with the poisoning of mental and physical health, the uprooting of social structures, economic and political corruption, environmental pollution and media manipulation.
With the Great Recession in 2008, Beaumont began an ongoing sculpture project to address consumerism, the construction of identity, and the seismic global economic shift on a personal level.
These conceptual studies include site-specific arrangements of wooden sound columns (made of reclaimed organ pipes, which would play audio of songs in endangered languages).
[15] Beaumont is the founder of Art Research Collaboration (ARC), a non-profit organization that promotes and develops large-scale media and environmental projects that could otherwise not be realized.