Works 1969–1980

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.

The image is partnered with a work from 2001 entitled Timeline of Global Oil Spills 1960-2004, a stark black and white pigment print that graphically lists the many major global oil spills in a poetic timeline.

Her earliest work paralleled the growth of the West Coast women's art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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.

In 1977, Beaumont created Cable Piece, forming an enormous iron ring of 4,000 feet of cable measuring 100 feet in diameter, which was left to bury itself slowly in the ground on a farm in Macomb, Illinois. The rust content of the ring affected the growth pattern of the soil, over time transforming the metal ring into a lush grass circle. 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.

Beaumont's 1977 work Found Words is a record of found fragments originating from anonymous people and their unknown activities. After nine months of photographing the fragments, the systemic work began when the first one was brought into her studio. 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.

In 1978, Beaumont created a set of chromogenic prints entitled Love Canal USA. Hooker Chemical Company had used the Love Canal, near Niagara Falls, New York, as a dumping site for several decades. The waste eventually seeped into and contaminated the neighborhood's soil and groundwater, leading to a host of health problems for residents. 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.

A decade of large-scale studio sculptures, shown at the National Museum of Art in Tokyo and in Kyoto, as well as a decade of five outdoor concept-based performative site-works, culminated in the grand-scale Ocean Landmark (1978–80), which also dealt with the issues of reclamation and the future, working through the one toward the viability of the other. This art-and-science collaboration is a trans-disciplinary environmental artwork that recycles waste, establishes a habitat for fish, is fished and continues to feed people, is a model for new industry that considers industrial ecology, and is a vision of how to revitalize the coastal fishing industry.

Ocean Landmark (1978–1980)

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.

She collaborated with a team of scientists and engineers who were experimenting with coal-waste and ways to stabilize the industrial byproduct in water.^[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. Rendered inert, the waste material was laid 70 feet below the Atlantic Ocean's surface and became a lush underwater garden.^[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.

Works 1984-Present

In the following years, Beaumont worked to develop Windows on Multinationals (1984–87), Toxic Imaging (1987) and El Otro Sendero (1988). 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.

In 1989, Beaumont began working on a project that would continue to develop and expand for the next two decades. Titled A Night in Alexandria...The Rainforest...Whose Histories Are They Anyway?, Beaumont created a transformative and cautionary dissertation on the meaning of loss.

Beaumont created a list of over 150 personally significant books and collected replicas from bookstores. The books were treated, burned, displayed, and arranged in over thirty feet of floor to ceiling shelving. Through the metaphor of fire and the social horror of book burning, the project grieves the irretrievable loss of species (DNA) contained in the rainforest, as irretrievable as the loss of the ancient body of knowledge contained at the Library of Alexandria—both sources of encyclopedic information.

For the first anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in Prague, Beaumont created the installation Voices (Whose What Which) (1990) at the Stalinov Pomnik. The opening was attended by Vaclav Havel. This work invites the viewer to participate in a visual dialogue questioning the origins and location of voice by exploring public language in a public place.

A founding member of REPOhistory,^[9] she coordinated and produced, with other artists, the medical section of Choice Histories (1992) installation at Artists Space.

In 2004, Beaumont created Camouflaged Cell Concealment Sites, a series of color photographs documenting camouflaged cell towers disguised as everyday sights such as palm trees, water towers, and cacti throughout various climates like Azusa, California; Phoenix, Arizona; Atlanta, Georgia; and Sparta, New Jersey.^[10] She seeks to examine the extent in which greenwashing exhibits itself throughout natural environments and a reconsideration of preconceptions.

In 2006 Beaumont created Boxed In/Boxed Out: The Mobile Studio Project, an ambitious solo installation pointing to the suburbanization of Manhattan following the displacement of artists and demolition of historic architecture in favor of large-scale condos, which was held across from the NY Stock Exchange in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's (LMCC) 3000 square-foot Swing Space.

In 2008 Beaumont had a solo exhibition at the New Arts Program in Kutztown, PA,^[11] entitled Who Will Our Children Sing Songs About in 100 Years?, an installation that consisted of four geometric sculptures: a line (parallel to the floor), a circle, a triangle and a rectangle, all constructed of children's chairs. The colors for the four chair-arranged geometries relate directly to the flag colors of nations with the fastest explosion or implosion of population change: USA, Africa, China, and India, while Children's XO laptops display world clock counters.

A related work, Way (2009), contains 21 variations of the word Way paired with WHOSE, WHAT, WHICH in Swahili, Hindi, Chinese, and English written on 500-sheets of a wall-mounted, tear-off-sheet tablet. The work is one in a series using tear-off-sheet tablets. As each sheet is torn, the work is changed to reveal one of the permutations challenging the viewer to re-examine their beliefs, actions or inactions, tolerance of misinformation and potential to effect change- while the pile reflects viewer participation.

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. Untitled (Crushed), a work consisting of one-hundred-plus unique works- crushed branded shopping bags collected by Beaumont, presents the bags as deconstructed fetishized icons of beauty and the branding of identity.

A related work, the sculptural assemblage Prêt-à-Porter, is a societal construct of identity. The work consists of a collection of international shopping bags, a rolling double clothes rack, and hangers. The branded shopping bags are hung with tags naming the individual who contributed the bag. The highly designed and produced bags are surrogates for both garment and identity, while each nametag labels a person with a specific branded identity.

In June 2012, the entire Alexandria... series was presented together for the first time at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt (the physical installation having been previously shown at MoMA PS1 and at Hudson River Museum). The newly designed recently built Bibliotheca Alexandrina at the site of the ancient library was an ideal venue for the exhibition of the Alexandria... series, which included the new Global Lost Libraries (2012), sequential projections of photographs of volumes Beaumont had burned, accompanied by live readings of the contents of global lost libraries. Four prints plus a 148-page digital catalog are now in the permanent archives of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Inspired by her experience in Egypt during the country's 2012 election week and of demonstrations at Cairo's Tahrir Square, she created Arab Voices in 2012. Four words—Whose, What, Which, and My—were translated into Arabic and were placed in various locations on four walls. The installation examined, questioned, and expanded the newly established public sphere of connection and interchange through the possibilities of voice. Arab Voices built upon a range of her previous works that promote audience participation, some of which include WAY and Voices and Morals, Ethics, Values.

Studio Papers Redux – It Makes My Head Spin & My Heart Sing (2013) is a personal series of works that were a celebration of Beaumont's forty years of working in her New York City studio since 1973. Shredded and altered studio papers spanning those forty years- project research, descriptions, proposals and notes- were shredded and combined with musical instruments. Beaumont has said that the installation was informed by a dream she had the first week moving to NYC. "My possessions were on fire, yet were not destroyed, and were burning—a surrealist image of energy."

In early 2016, an exhibition at the DiMattio Gallery in Monmouth, New Jersey presented installation studies for a project addressing language attrition. 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). This project furthers Beaumont's continuing interest in the erosion of human knowledge and the cultural amnesia that accompanies the loss of languages.