News
Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” Added to National Register of Historic Places
The 1,500-foot-long sculpture on the shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah is considered one of the most important works of the Land Art movement.
Robert Smithson
Art
Two Artists’ Very Different Places in Nature
The show Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson traces the ways that the two artists’ sociopolitical positions shaped their perspectives.
Art
Some Important Questions About Artist Legacies
How is legacy defined, who defines it, whom does it serve?
Film
A Transportive Film Series Spotlights Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson
The films created by the legendary artists move beyond pure documentation, adding layers of context and revealing insights into their respective practices.
Art
Robert Smithson’s Experiments in Entropy
Revisiting Smithson’s earthworks “Spiral Jetty” and “Partially Buried Woodshed,” which have dramatically changed 50 years later.
Film
A Rediscovered Nancy Holt Documentary From 1970
The short documentary Utah Sequences, previously thought to be lost, purely displays Nancy Holt’s vision of time and place.
Art
Nancy Holt Brilliantly Emerges from the Shadows
In 2018, she became the first female Land artist in the Dia Art Foundation's collection, but it has taken decades for Holt to gain recognition. A new exhibition argues she was truly an artistic innovator.
Art
A Pastel Portrait of Spiral Jetty and Its Environs
In describing the surrounding landscape of Spiral Jetty in a 1972 essay, Robert Smithson gives us ample descriptions of color, from the “deposits of black basalt” to “shallow pinkish water” to his sublime view of “a flaming chromosphere.” It’s particularly fitting, then, that for a new site-specific commission for
Art
When Art Refuses to Let Go
Delirious at the Met Breuer is an exhibition filled with beautiful but comparatively polite works by habitually transgressive artists.
Art
How Can Ecological Artists Move Beyond Aesthetic Gestures?
If art is to be relevant to the environment, it needs to move beyond an art context to engage with the land itself.
Art
As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, "Spiral Jetty" May Be Marooned
The lake that hosts Robert Smithson's landmark earthwork is desiccating at an alarming rate.
Art
The Met Breuer Traces the Unfinished to the Deliberately Incomplete in Western Art
At a press preview earlier this month, Sheena Wagstaff, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s chairwoman for modern and contemporary art, said that “arguably only the Met” could put on a show like Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.