CHRISTOPHER XAVIER O'HARE - Artist's Biography

Christopher Xavier O’Hare is an architectural sculptor and painter whose body of work includes architectural relief sculpture and monumental public art works on exhibition in Asia, North America and the Middle East. He lives and works in South Florida.

 

O'Hare was born in 1954 in New York City where he received his earliest training in art and environmental conservation. In 1978 O'Hare became a Registered Landscape Architect in Florida and designed commissioned environmental gardens from Miami Beach to Palm Beach for 10 years. 

In 1988 O'Hare refocused from his environmental design work and pursued fine art while on extended sabbaticals in Paris, Barcelona, Oslo, Stockholm, Rome, Venice and Athens. During this period, O’Hare began accepting commissions from architects to create architectural sculpture for projects throughout North America. O’Hare managed the design, fabrication and installation portion of many projects while coordinating with construction project managers, and related contractors, engineers and architects to insure successful project completion.

 

O’Hare’s first monumental public art commission was to create nine large heroic figures for permanent exhibition at the Jordan Hall of Science at Notre Dame University in 2006. Today O’Hare’s work is exhibited on projects located from Okinawa, Japan to Dubai, United Arab Emirates and throughout most of the United States and its territories. His body of work includes bas-relief and sculpture-in-the-round works exhibited on hundreds of government, institutional, corporate and private projects. 

 

Throughout his career O'Hare has committed himself to environmental stewardship. In 1983 he started developing sculptural forms intended to restore and promote marine ecosystems. O’Hare design and built the Firehock Memorial Reef in 2005, the Phil Foster Park Snorkel Trail in 2013, Peanut Island Snorkel Reef in 2014, Andrew “Red” Harris Memorial Reef in 2015 and smaller experimental reefs to present. Through an ongoing process of design, deployment, observation and refinement he has created artificial reef modules that successfully create opportunities to mitigate some of the damages caused by overdeveloped shorelines and climate change. The sculptural qualities of O’Hare’s reef creations also attract divers who would otherwise impact adjacent fragile reefs with their visits. His goal is to create productive marine communities where none existed before and promote awareness of our responsibility to protect and enhance marine ecosystems. O’Hare continues to accept public and private art commissions while also refining and deploying his sculpted reef modules.

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Recently O’Hare join with other artists to create a new artificial reef in Fort Lauderdale. The project known as 1000 Mermaids will combine sculpture and productive reef forms to attract divers to the area and provide much needed bio-marine enhancements.