Land art, variously known as Earth art, environmental art, and Earthworks, is an
art movement
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period of time, (usually a few months, years or decades) or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defin ...
that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely associated with Great Britain and the United States
[Art in the modern era: A guide to styles, schools, & movements. Abrams, 2002. (U.S. edition of Styles, Schools and Movements, by Amy Dempsey) ] but that also includes examples from many countries. As a trend, "land art" expanded boundaries of art by the materials used and the siting of the works. The materials used were often the materials of the Earth, including the soil, rocks, vegetation, and water found on-site, and the sites of the works were often distant from population centers. Though sometimes fairly inaccessible, photo documentation was commonly brought back to the urban art gallery.
[http://www.land-arts.com](_blank)
Land art.
Concerns of the art movement centered around rejection of the commercialization of art-making and enthusiasm with an emergent ecological movement. The art movement coincided with the popularity of the rejection of urban living and its counterpart, an enthusiasm for that which is rural. Included in these inclinations were spiritual yearnings concerning the planet
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surfa ...
as home to humanity.
Form
In the 1960s and 1970s land art protested "ruthless commercialization" of art in
America
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
. During this period, exponents of land art rejected the
museum
A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...
or
gallery
Gallery or The Gallery may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
* Art gallery
** Contemporary art gallery
Music
* Gallery (band), an American soft rock band of the 1970s
Albums
* ''Gallery'' (Elaiza album), 2014 album
* ''Gallery'' (Gr ...
as the setting of artistic activity and developed monumental landscape projects which were beyond the reach of traditional transportable
sculpture
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...
and the commercial art market, although photographic documentation was often presented in normal gallery spaces. Land art was inspired by
minimal art
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or co ...
and
conceptual art
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called insta ...
but also by modern movements such as
De Stijl
''De Stijl'' (; ), Dutch for "The Style", also known as Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden. De Stijl consisted of artists and architects. In a more narrow sense, the term ''De Stijl'' is used to refer to a body ...
,
Cubism
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...
,
minimalism
In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...
and the work of
Constantin Brâncuși
Constantin Brâncuși (; February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957) was a Romanian Sculpture, sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th-century and a pioneer of ...
and
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( , ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, sociology, and anthroposophy. He was a founder of a provocative art mov ...
. Many of the artists associated with land art had been involved with minimal art and
conceptual art
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called insta ...
.
Isamu Noguchi
was an American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several ...
's 1941 design for ''Contoured Playground'' in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
is sometimes interpreted as an important early piece of land art even though the artist himself never called his work "land art" but simply "sculpture". His influence on contemporary land art,
landscape architecture
Landscape architecture is the design of outdoor areas, landmarks, and structures to achieve environmental, social-behavioural, or aesthetic outcomes. It involves the systematic design and general engineering of various structures for constructio ...
and
environmental sculpture
Environmental sculpture is sculpture that creates or alters the environment for the viewer, as opposed to presenting itself figurally or monumentally before the viewer. A frequent trait of larger environmental sculptures is that one can actually en ...
is evident in many works today.
[Udo Weilacher, ''Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art''. Birkhäuser, 1999, Basel Berlin Boston 1999 ]
Alan Sonfist
Alan Sonfist is a New York City based American artist best known as a "pioneer" and a "trailblazer" of the Land or Earth Art movement.
He first gained prominence for his " Time Landscape" found on the corner of West Houston Street and LaGuardia ...
used an alternative approach to working with
nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...
and
culture
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.Tyl ...
by bringing historical nature and
sustainable art Sustainable art is art in harmony with the key principles of sustainability, which include ecology, social justice, non-violence and grassroots democracy.
Sustainable art may also be understood as art that is produced with consideration for the wide ...
back into New York City. His most inspirational work is ''Time Landscape'', an indigenous forest he planted in New York City.
He also created several other ''Time Landscapes'' around the world such as ''Circles of Time'' in
Florence, Italy documenting the historical usage of the land, and recently at the
deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum
The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum is a 30-acre sculpture park and contemporary art museum on the shore of Flint's Pond in Lincoln, Massachusetts, 20 miles northwest of Boston. It was established in 1950. It is the largest park of its kind ...
outside Boston. According to critic
Barbara Rose, writing in ''
Artforum
''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notabl ...
'' in 1969, he had become disillusioned with the commodification and insularity of gallery bound art. In 1967, the
art critic
An art critic is a person who is specialized in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating art. Their written critiques or reviews contribute to art criticism and they are published in newspapers, magazines, books, exhibition brochures, and catalogue ...
Grace Glueck
Grace Glueck (July 24, 1926 – October 8, 2022) was an American arts journalist. She worked for ''The New York Times'' from 1951 until the early 2010s.
Early life
Glueck was born in New York City on July 24, 1926. Her father, Ernest, worked ...
writing in ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' declared the first Earthwork to be done by Douglas Leichter and Richard Saba at the
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is an artists residency located in Madison, Maine, just outside of Skowhegan. Every year, the program accepts online applications from emerging artists from November through January, and selects 65 ...
.
The sudden appearance of land art in 1968 can be located as a response by a generation of artists mostly in their late twenties to the heightened political activism of the year and the emerging
environmental
A biophysical environment is a biotic and abiotic surrounding of an organism or population, and consequently includes the factors that have an influence in their survival, development, and evolution. A biophysical environment can vary in scale f ...
and
women's liberation
The women's liberation movement (WLM) was a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism that emerged in the late 1960s and continued into the 1980s primarily in the industrialized nations of the Western world, which effected great ...
movements.
One example of land art in the 20th century was a group exhibition called "Earthworks" created in 1968 at the Dwan Gallery in New York. In February 1969,
Willoughby Sharp
Willoughby Sharp (January 23, 1936 – December 17, 2008) was an American artist, independent curator, independent publisher (he was co-founder and co-editor of Avalanche Magazine with Liza Béar), gallerist, teacher, author, and telecom activist ...
curated the "Earth Art" exhibition at the
Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
, Ithaca, New York. The artists included were
Walter De Maria
Walter Joseph De Maria Roberta Smith (July 26, 2013)Walter De Maria, Artist on Grand Scale, Dies at 77 '' New York Times''. (October 1, 1935July 25, 2013) was an American artist, sculptor, illustrator and composer, who lived and worked in New Y ...
,
Jan Dibbets
Jan Dibbets (born 9 May 1941, in Weert) is an Amsterdam-based Dutch conceptual artist. His work is influenced by mathematics and works mainly with photography.
Life and career
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he started as an art teacher at the ...
,
Hans Haacke
Hans Haacke (born August 12, 1936) is a Germany, German-born artist who lives and works in New York City. Haacke is considered a "leading exponent" of Institutional Critique.
Early life
Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the ''S ...
,
Michael Heizer
Michael Heizer (born 1944) is an American land artist specializing in large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Working largely outside the confines of the traditional art spaces of galleries and museums, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms ...
,
Neil Jenney
Neil Jenney is a self-taught artist born on November 6, 1945 in Torrington, Connecticut. He attended Massachusetts College of Art in 1964. In 1966 he moved to New York City where he currently resides.
His painting style was described by the art ...
,
Richard Long,
David Medalla
David Cortez Medalla (23 March 1942 – 28 December 2020) was a Filipino international artist and political activist. His work ranged from sculpture and kinetic art to painting, installation, and performance art.
Early life
David Cortez Med ...
,
Robert Morris,
Dennis Oppenheim
Dennis Oppenheim (September 6, 1938 – January 21, 2011) was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer. Dennis Oppenheim's early artistic practice is an epistemological questioning about the natu ...
,
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and mu ...
, and
Gunther Uecker
Gundaharius or Gundahar (died 437), better known by his legendary names Gunther ( gmh, Gunther) or Gunnar ( non, Gunnarr), was a historical king of Burgundy in the early 5th century. Gundahar is attested as ruling his people shortly after they ...
. The exhibition was directed by Thomas W. Leavitt. Gordon Matta-Clark, who lived in Ithaca at the time, was invited by Sharp to help the artists in "Earth Art" with the on-site execution of their works for the exhibition.
Perhaps the best known artist who worked in this genre was
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and mu ...
whose 1968 essay "The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects" provided a critical framework for the movement as a reaction to the disengagement of
Modernism
Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
from social issues as represented by the critic
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg () (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994), occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formali ...
. His best known piece, and probably the most famous piece of all land art, is the ''
Spiral Jetty
''Spiral Jetty'' is an earthwork sculpture constructed in April 1970 that is considered to be the most important work of American sculptor Robert Smithson. Smithson documented the construction of the sculpture in a 32-minute color film also tit ...
'' (1970), for which Smithson arranged rock, earth and
algae
Algae (; singular alga ) is an informal term for a large and diverse group of photosynthetic eukaryotic organisms. It is a polyphyletic grouping that includes species from multiple distinct clades. Included organisms range from unicellular mic ...
so as to form a long (1500 ft) spiral-shape
jetty
A jetty is a structure that projects from land out into water. A jetty may serve as a breakwater, as a walkway, or both; or, in pairs, as a means of constricting a channel. The term derives from the French word ', "thrown", signifying some ...
protruding into
Great Salt Lake
The Great Salt Lake is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth-largest terminal lake in the world. It lies in the northern part of the U.S. state of Utah and has a substantial impact upon the local climate, particula ...
in northern
Utah
Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to it ...
,
U.S.
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
How much of the work, if any, is visible is dependent on the fluctuating water levels. Since its creation, the work has been completely covered, and then uncovered again, by water. A steward of the artwork in conjunction with the Dia Foundation, the
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) is the region's primary resource for culture and visual arts. It is located in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building in Salt Lake City, Utah on the University of Utah campus near Rice-Eccles Stadium. Works ...
regularly curates programming around the Spiral Jetty, including a "Family Backpacks" program. Smithson's ''Gravel Mirror with Cracks and Dust'' (1968) is an example of land art existing in a
gallery
Gallery or The Gallery may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
* Art gallery
** Contemporary art gallery
Music
* Gallery (band), an American soft rock band of the 1970s
Albums
* ''Gallery'' (Elaiza album), 2014 album
* ''Gallery'' (Gr ...
space rather than in the natural environment. It consists of a pile of gravel by the side of a partially mirrored gallery wall. In its simplicity of form and concentration on the materials themselves, this and other pieces of land art have an affinity with
minimalism
In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...
. There is also a relationship to
Arte Povera in the use of materials traditionally considered "unartistic" or "worthless". The Italian
Germano Celant
Germano Celant (11 September 1940 – 29 April 2020) was an Italian art historian, critic and curator who coined the term " Arte Povera" (poor art) in 1967 and wrote many articles and books on the subject.
Work
Germano Celant was born in Genoa ...
, founder of Arte Povera, was one of the first curators to promote land art.
"Land artists" have tended to be American,
with other prominent artists in this field being
Carl Andre
Carl Andre (born September 16, 1935) is an American minimalist artist recognized for his ordered linear and grid format sculptures and for the suspected murder of contemporary and wife, Ana Mendieta. His sculptures range from large public art ...
,
Alice Aycock
Alice Aycock (born November 20, 1946) is an American sculptor and installation artist. She was an early artist in the land art movement in the 1970s, and has created many large-scale metal sculptures around the world. Aycock's drawings and sculp ...
,
Walter De Maria
Walter Joseph De Maria Roberta Smith (July 26, 2013)Walter De Maria, Artist on Grand Scale, Dies at 77 '' New York Times''. (October 1, 1935July 25, 2013) was an American artist, sculptor, illustrator and composer, who lived and worked in New Y ...
,
Hans Haacke
Hans Haacke (born August 12, 1936) is a Germany, German-born artist who lives and works in New York City. Haacke is considered a "leading exponent" of Institutional Critique.
Early life
Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the ''S ...
,
Michael Heizer
Michael Heizer (born 1944) is an American land artist specializing in large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Working largely outside the confines of the traditional art spaces of galleries and museums, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms ...
,
Nancy Holt
Nancy Holt (April 5, 1938 – February 8, 2014) was an American artist most known for her public sculpture, installation art, concrete poetry, and land art. Throughout her career, Holt also produced works in other media, including film and pho ...
,
Peter Hutchinson
Peter Hutchinson (born December 17, 1949) is an Politics of the United States, American politician, businessperson, businessman and philanthropy, philanthropy executive from the U.S. state of Minnesota. He ran as the Independence Party of Minnes ...
,
Ana Mendieta
Ana Mendieta (November 18, 1948 – September 8, 1985) was a Cuban-American performance artist, sculptor, painter and video artist who is best known for her "earth-body" artwork. Born in Havana, Mendieta left for the United States in 1961.
Earl ...
,
Dennis Oppenheim
Dennis Oppenheim (September 6, 1938 – January 21, 2011) was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer. Dennis Oppenheim's early artistic practice is an epistemological questioning about the natu ...
,
Andrew Rogers,
Charles Ross,
Alan Sonfist
Alan Sonfist is a New York City based American artist best known as a "pioneer" and a "trailblazer" of the Land or Earth Art movement.
He first gained prominence for his " Time Landscape" found on the corner of West Houston Street and LaGuardia ...
, and
James Turrell
James Turrell (born May 6, 1943) is an American artist known for his work within the Light and Space movement. Much of Turrell's career has been devoted to a still-unfinished work, ''Roden Crater'', a natural cinder cone crater located outsid ...
. Turrell began work in 1972 on possibly the largest piece of land art thus far, reshaping the earth surrounding the extinct
Roden Crater
Roden Crater is a cinder cone type of volcanic cone from an extinct volcano, with a remaining interior volcanic crater. It is located approximately 50 miles northeast of the city of Flagstaff in northern Arizona, United States.
Art project
A ...
volcano
A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface.
On Earth, volcanoes are most often found where tectonic plates are ...
in
Arizona
Arizona ( ; nv, Hoozdo Hahoodzo ; ood, Alĭ ṣonak ) is a state in the Southwestern United States. It is the 6th largest and the 14th most populous of the 50 states. Its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona is part of the Fou ...
. Perhaps the most prominent non-American land artists are the
British
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
Chris Drury
Christopher Ellis Drury (born August 20, 1976) is an American professional ice hockey executive and former player. He has served as the president and general manager for the New York Rangers since May 5, 2021. He previously served as the genera ...
,
Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy (born 26 July 1956) is an English sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings.
Early life
Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire on 26 Ju ...
,
Richard Long and the Australian
Andrew Rogers.
In 1973
Jacek Tylicki
Jacek Tylicki (born 1951 in Sopot, Poland) is a Polish artist who settled in New York City in 1982. Tylicki works in the field of land art, installation art, and site-specific art. His conceptual projects often raise social and environmental ...
begins to lay out blank canvases or paper sheets in the natural environment for the nature to create art.
Some projects by the artists
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009), known as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, were artists noted for their large-scale, site-specific environmental installations, often large landmarks and ...
(who are famous for wrapping monuments, buildings and landscapes in
fabric
Textile is an umbrella term that includes various fiber-based materials, including fibers, yarns, filaments, threads, different fabric types, etc. At first, the word "textiles" only referred to woven fabrics. However, weaving is not the ...
) have also been considered land art by some, though the artists themselves consider this incorrect.
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( , ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, sociology, and anthroposophy. He was a founder of a provocative art mov ...
's concept of "
social sculpture Social sculpture is a phrase used to describe an expanded concept of art that was invented by the artist and co-founder of the German Green Party, Joseph Beuys. Beuys created the term "social sculpture" to embody his understanding of art's potentia ...
" influenced "land art", and his *
7000 Eichen* project of 1982 to plant 7,000 Oak trees has many similarities to land art processes.
Rogers Rogers may refer to:
Places
Canada
*Rogers Pass (British Columbia)
* Rogers Island (Nunavut)
United States
* Rogers, Arkansas, a city
* Rogers, alternate name of Muroc, California, a former settlement
* Rogers, Indiana, an unincorporated communit ...
' “Rhythms of Life” project is the largest contemporary land-art undertaking in the world, forming a chain of stone sculptures, or
geoglyph
A geoglyph is a large design or motif (generally longer than 4 metres) produced on the ground by durable elements of the landscape, such as stones, stone fragments, gravel, or earth. A positive geoglyph is formed by the arrangement and alignmen ...
s, around the globe – 12 sites – in disparate exotic locations (from below sea level and up to altitudes of 4,300 m/14,107 ft). Up to three geoglyphs (ranging in size up to 40,000 sq m/430,560 sq ft) are located in each site.
Land artists in America relied mostly on wealthy
patron
Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows on another. In the history of art, arts patronage refers to the support that kings, popes, and the wealthy have provided to artists su ...
s and
private foundation
A private foundation is a tax-exempt organization not relying on broad public support and generally claiming to serve humanitarian purposes. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private foundation in the U.S. with over $38 billion ...
s to fund their often costly projects. With the sudden economic downturn of the mid-1970s, funds from these sources largely stopped. With the death of Robert Smithson in a plane crash in 1973, the movement lost one of its most important figureheads and faded out. Charles Ross continues to work on the ''
Star Axis
''Star Axis'' is an earthwork built by American sculptor Charles Ross (artist), Charles Ross to observe the stars, which is considered to be a defining example of land art. The roughly eleven-story architectonic sculpture and naked-eye observat ...
'' project, which he began in 1971.
[Hass, Nancy]
"What Happens When a Single Art Project Becomes a Decades-Long Obsession?,"
''The New York Times'', September 18, 2018. Retrieved January 27, 2022.[Beachy-Quick, Dan]
"Cosmic Dancer: Dan Beachy-Quick on Charles Ross’s Star Axis,"
''Artforum'', October 28, 2021. Retrieved June 10, 2022. Michael Heizer in 2022 completed his work on ''
City
A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...
'', and James Turrell continues to work on the ''
Roden Crater
Roden Crater is a cinder cone type of volcanic cone from an extinct volcano, with a remaining interior volcanic crater. It is located approximately 50 miles northeast of the city of Flagstaff in northern Arizona, United States.
Art project
A ...
'' project. In most respects, "land art" has become part of mainstream
public art
Public art is art in any Media (arts), media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse. Public art is visually and phy ...
and in many cases the term "land art" is misused to label any kind of art in nature even though conceptually not related to the
avant-garde
The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...
works by the pioneers of land art.
The Earth art of the 1960s were sometimes reminiscent of the much older land works,
Stonehenge
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, west of Amesbury. It consists of an outer ring of vertical sarsen standing stones, each around high, wide, and weighing around 25 tons, topped by connectin ...
, the
Pyramids
A pyramid (from el, πυραμίς ') is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single step at the top, making the shape roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilate ...
,
Native American mounds, the
Nazca Lines in Peru,
Carnac stones and
Native American burial grounds, and often evoked the spirituality of such archeological sites.
Contemporary land artists
*
Betty Beaumont (born 1946)
*
Milton Becerra
Milton Becerra (born 1951) is a Venezuelan artist who pioneered land art in Venezuela in the 1970s.
Early works
He graduated from the Cristóbal Rojas School of Arts (1972) under the Jesús Soto promotion. From 1973 to 1980 Milton Becerra ...
(born 1951)
*
Marinus Boezem
Marinus Lambertus van den Boezem (born 28 January 1934) is a Dutch artist.
He is known for his radical view of art and his works in public space. Together with Wim T. Schippers, Ger van Elk and Jan Dibbets, Boezem is seen as one of the main repre ...
(born 1934)
*
Chris Booth (born 1948)
*
Eberhard Bosslet
Eberhard Bosslet (born 1953) is a German contemporary artist who has been producing site-specific art and architectural-related works, such as sculpture, installation, light art and painting, all indoors and outdoors, since 1979.
Biography
...
(born 1953)
*
Alberto Burri (1915-1995)
*
Mel Chin
Mel Chin (born 1951 in Houston, Texas, USA) is a conceptual art, conceptual visual artist. Motivated largely by political, cultural, and social circumstances, Chin works in a variety of art media to calculate meaning in modern life. Chin places art ...
(born 1951)
*
Christo and Jeanne Claude
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009), known as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, were artists noted for their large-scale, site-specific art, site-specific environmental art, environmental art i ...
Christo (1935-2020) Jeanne (1935-2009)
*
Walter De Maria
Walter Joseph De Maria Roberta Smith (July 26, 2013)Walter De Maria, Artist on Grand Scale, Dies at 77 '' New York Times''. (October 1, 1935July 25, 2013) was an American artist, sculptor, illustrator and composer, who lived and worked in New Y ...
(1935-2013)
*
Lucien den Arend
Lucien Armand Marco den Arend (born 15 December 1943) is a geometric abstract sculptor. As is the case with concrete art, his work is not modeled after any existing object – his sculpture represents only itself. Most of his sculptures and Land ...
(born 1943)
*
Agnes Denes
Agnes Denes (Dénes Ágnes; born 1931 in Budapest) is a Hungarian-born American conceptual artist based in New York. She is known for works in a wide range of media—from poetry and philosophical writings to extremely detailed drawings, sculptu ...
(born 1938)
*
Jan Dibbets
Jan Dibbets (born 9 May 1941, in Weert) is an Amsterdam-based Dutch conceptual artist. His work is influenced by mathematics and works mainly with photography.
Life and career
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he started as an art teacher at the ...
(born 1941)
*
Harvey Fite
Harvey Fite (December 25, 1903 – May 9, 1976)
. ...
(1903-1976)
*
Barry Flanagan
Barry Flanagan OBE RA (11 January 1941 – 31 August 2009) was an Irish-Welsh sculptor. He is best known for his bronze statues of hares and other animals.
Biography
Barry Flanagan was born on 11 January 1941 in Prestatyn, North Wales. F ...
(1941-2009)
*
Hamish Fulton
Hamish Fulton (born 1946) is an English walking artist. Since 1972 he has only made works based on the experience of walks. He translates his walks into a variety of media, including photography, illustrations, and wall texts. His work is containe ...
(born 1946)
*
Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy (born 26 July 1956) is an English sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings.
Early life
Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire on 26 Ju ...
(born 1956)
*
Michael Heizer
Michael Heizer (born 1944) is an American land artist specializing in large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Working largely outside the confines of the traditional art spaces of galleries and museums, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms ...
(born 1944)
*
Nancy Holt
Nancy Holt (April 5, 1938 – February 8, 2014) was an American artist most known for her public sculpture, installation art, concrete poetry, and land art. Throughout her career, Holt also produced works in other media, including film and pho ...
(1938-2014)
*
Peter Hutchinson
Peter Hutchinson (born December 17, 1949) is an Politics of the United States, American politician, businessperson, businessman and philanthropy, philanthropy executive from the U.S. state of Minnesota. He ran as the Independence Party of Minnes ...
(born 1930)
*
Junichi Kakizaki
is a Japanese artist, sculptor, floral artist, nature art artist, land art artist and environmental artist. He exhibits regularly both in Japan and internationally. Since 1992, he has mainly worked on scenography. He brought a floral design ...
(born 1971)
*
Dani Karavan
Daniel "Dani" Karavan ( he, דני קרוון, 7 December 1930 – 29 May 2021) was an Israeli sculptor best known for site specific memorials and monuments which merge into the environment.
Biography
Daniel (Dani) Karavan was born in Tel A ...
(1930–2021)
*
Maya Lin
Maya Ying Lin (born October 5, 1959) is an American designer and sculptor. In 1981, while an undergraduate at Yale University, she achieved national recognition when she won a national design competition for the planned Vietnam Veterans Memoria ...
(born 1959)
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Richard Long (born 1945)
*
Robert Morris (1931-2018)
*
Vik Muniz
Vik Muniz (; born 1961) is a Brazilian artist and photographer. Initially a sculptor, Muniz grew interested with the photographic representations of his work, eventually focusing completely on photography. Primarily working with unconventional ma ...
(born 1961)
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David Nash (born 1945)
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Ugo Rondinone
Ugo Rondinone (born November 30, 1964) is a Swiss-born artist widely recognized for his mastery of several different media—most prominently sculpture, drawing and painting, but also photography, architecture, video and sound installation— ...
(born 1964)
*
Dennis Oppenheim
Dennis Oppenheim (September 6, 1938 – January 21, 2011) was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer. Dennis Oppenheim's early artistic practice is an epistemological questioning about the natu ...
(1938-2011)
*
Georgia Papageorge (born 1941)
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Beverly Pepper
Beverly Pepper (née Stoll; December 20, 1922 – February 5, 2020) was an American sculptor known for her monumental works, site specific and land art. She remained independent from any particular art movement. She lived in Italy, primarily in ...
(1922-2020)
*
Tanya Preminger
Tanya Preminger ( he, טניה פרמינגר), is an artist working in various media: environmental art, site-specific art, ephemeral art, sculpture, installation and photography. She is mostly known for her land art projects and large-scale s ...
(born 1944)
*
Andrew Rogers (born 1947)
*
Charles Ross (born 1937)
*
Richard Shilling (born 1973)
*
Nobuo Sekine
was a Japanese sculptor who resided in both Tokyo, Japan, and Los Angeles, California.
A graduate of Tama Art University, he was one of the key members of Mono-ha, a group of artists who became prominent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The M ...
(1942-2019)
*
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and mu ...
(1938-1973)
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Alan Sonfist
Alan Sonfist is a New York City based American artist best known as a "pioneer" and a "trailblazer" of the Land or Earth Art movement.
He first gained prominence for his " Time Landscape" found on the corner of West Houston Street and LaGuardia ...
(born 1946)
*
James Turrell
James Turrell (born May 6, 1943) is an American artist known for his work within the Light and Space movement. Much of Turrell's career has been devoted to a still-unfinished work, ''Roden Crater'', a natural cinder cone crater located outsid ...
(born 1943)
*
Jacek Tylicki
Jacek Tylicki (born 1951 in Sopot, Poland) is a Polish artist who settled in New York City in 1982. Tylicki works in the field of land art, installation art, and site-specific art. His conceptual projects often raise social and environmental ...
(born 1951)
*
Nils Udo
Nils is a Scandinavian given name, a chiefly Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Latvian variant of Niels, cognate to Nicholas.
People and animals with the given name
* Nils Bergström (born 1985), Swedish ice hockey player
*Nils Björk (1898–1989), ...
(born 1937)
*
Bill Vazan
Bill Vazan (born 1933) is a Canadian artist, known for land art, sculpture, painting and photography. His work has been exhibited in North America and internationally.
Career
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Vazan studied Fine Arts at the Ontario Colle ...
(born 1933)
*
Strijdom van der Merwe
Strijdom van der Merwe (born 1961) is a South African land artist who uses materials he finds on site to create his artworks. His materials include sand, water, wood, rocks and stone. By shaping these elements into geometric forms he juxtaposes t ...
(born 1961)
See also
*
Earth figures
*
Ecofeminist art
Ecofeminist art emerged in the 1970s in response to ecofeminist philosophy, that was particularly articulated by writers such as Carolyn Merchant, Val Plumwood, Donna Haraway, Starhawk, Greta Gaard, Karen J. Warren, and Rebecca Solnit. Those w ...
*
Ecological art
Ecological art is an art genre and artistic practice that seeks to preserve, remediate and/or vitalize the life forms, resources and ecology of Earth. Ecological art practitioners do this by applying the principles of ecosystems to living species a ...
*
Ecovention Ecovention was a term invented by Amy Lipton and Sue Spaid in 1999 to refer to an ecological art intervention in environmental degradation. The Ecovention movement in art is associated with land art, earthworks, and environmental art, and landsc ...
*
Environmental art
Environmental art is a range of artistic practices encompassing both historical approaches to nature in art and more recent ecological and politically motivated types of works. Environmental art has evolved away from formal concerns, for example ...
*
Environmental sculpture
Environmental sculpture is sculpture that creates or alters the environment for the viewer, as opposed to presenting itself figurally or monumentally before the viewer. A frequent trait of larger environmental sculptures is that one can actually en ...
*
Independent public art
*
Land Arts of the American West
Land Arts of the American West is a studio-based field program that seeks to construct an expanded definition of land art through direct experience connecting the full range of human interventions in the landscape—from pre-contact indigenous to ...
*
Site-specific art
Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork. Site-specific art is produced both by commercial artists, and independently, and can ...
*
Tree Shaping
Tree shaping (also known by several other alternative names) uses living trees and other woody plants as the medium to create structures and art. There are a few different methods used by the various artists to shape their trees, which share a ...
References
Notes
Further reading
* Lawrence Alloway, Wolfgang Becker, Robert Rosenblum et al., Alan Sonfist, ''Nature: The End of Art'', Gli Ori, Dist. Thames & Hudson Florence, Italy,2004
* Max Andrews (Ed.): ''Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook''. London 2006
* John Beardsley: ''Earthworks and Beyond. Contemporary Art in the Landscape''. New York 1998
* Suzaan Boettger, ''Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties''. University of California Press 2002.
* Amy Dempsey: ''Destination Art''. Berkeley CA 2006
* Michel Draguet, Nils-Udo, Bob Verschueren, Bruseels: Atelier 340, 1992
*Larisa Dryansky, ""Cartophotographies : de l'art conceptuel au Land Art"", Paris, éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques-Institut national d'histoire de l'art, 2017.
* Jack Flam (Ed.). ''Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings'', Berkeley CA 1996
* John K. Grande: New York, London. ''Balance: Art and Nature'', Black Rose Books, 1994, 2003
* John K. Grande, Edward Lucie-Smith (Intro): ''Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists'', New York 2004
* John K. Grande,
David Peat
David Peat (22 March 1947 – 16 April 2012) was an award-winning Scottish documentary-maker, cinematographer and photographer.
Early life and education
Peat was born in Glasgow, Scotland. As a young man he worked in his family's shipping comp ...
& Edward Lucie-Smith (Introduction & forward) ''Dialogues in Diversity'', Italy: Pari Publishing, 2007,
*Eleanor Heartney, ''Andrew Rogers Geoglyphs, Rhythms of Life'', Edizioni Charta srl, Italy, 2009
* Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: ''A Retrospective View'', Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg / Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University,
* Jeffrey Kastner, Brian Wallis: ''Land and Environmental Art''. Boston 1998
* Lucy R Lippard: ''Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory''. New York 1983
*Alessandro Rocca: ''Natural Architecture.'' New York (2007)
*Chris Taylor and Bill Gilbert. ''Land Arts of the American West''. Austin: University of Texas Press; 2009.
* Gilles A. Tiberghien: ''Land Art''. Ed. Carré 1993/1995/2012
*
Udo Weilacher: ''Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art''. Basel Berlin Boston 1999
External links
Artist in Nature International NetworkDenarend.com - About land artLand Arts of the American WestOfficial UNM Land Arts of the American West Program WebsiteBroken CircleOBSART , Observatoire du Land Art*
Center for Land Use Interpretation entry for Land ArtThe Case for Land Art , The Art Assignment , PBS
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Contemporary art movements
Installation art
Art
Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...
Environmental design