Land Art Guide: 7 Influential Earthworks Artists

Land art, also known as Earth art or Earthworks, is an artform defined by works made outdoors with natural materials that interact with their surrounding landscapes. This form rejects the restrictions of an art gallery and brings its viewers into nature to provide a new perspective on the environment.

Land art as an artistic expression is thousands of years old, dating back to artworks like Stonehenge in England, the Nazca Lines in southern Peru, and the Egyptian pyramids. A modern land art movement grew in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely influenced by conceptual art, minimalism, and cubism. A 1968 exhibition entitled Earthworks, organized by the artist Robert Smithson and displayed at the Dwan Gallery in New York City, legitimized the movement, inspiring wealthy patrons to finance ambitious works of land art during the next few years. Although the movement lost momentum after Robert Smithson’s death in 1973, land artists around the world continue to build earthworks today.

Land art is a broad art form with a few unifying characteristics.

1. 1. Land art is site-specific. A work of land art is inherently linked to the landscape. Unlike other visual art forms like sculpture, land art is built into the landscape rather than placed on top of it. The best way to fully experience a piece of land art is to travel to its site of creation.
2. 2. Land art uses natural materials. Earthworks are built from natural materials typically gathered from the site itself. Some of the natural materials used in land art include soil, branches, stones, ice, leaves, and water.
3. 3. Land art changes with time. Pieces of land art are exposed to the elements, and they erode and decay with the wind and rain. Although some earthworks are made to withstand harsh weather conditions, many are ephemeral and disappear with time. As with conceptual art, a land artist can photograph their process of creation in order to share evidence of their ephemeral work with viewers in a gallery setting.

The following artists are among the most influential in the world of land art.

1. 1. Robert Smithson: Smithson’s most famous work is Spiral Jetty (1970), a 1,500-foot-long counterclockwise spiral made from mud, basalt rocks, and salt crystals extending into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The growing New York art scene of the 1950s and 1960s influenced Smithson, who began his vocation in abstract expressionism. He died in a plane crash while photographing the site of his final earthwork, Amarillo Ramp in Texas in 1973.
2. 2. Walter De Maria: After receiving his master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1960, De Maria created minimalist sculptures in New York using basic geometric shapes and mathematical sequences. His most famous piece of land art is The Lightning Field (1977), a rectangular grid of 400 stainless steel poles that span one mile in the middle of a New Mexico desert. Each steel pole has a pointed tip meant to attract lightning. The artwork is maintained to this day by the Dia Art Foundation.
3. 3. Alan Sonfist: A pioneer of the land art movement, Sonfist was commissioned in 1965 to create an influential piece of land art called Time Landscape, a garden in the middle of New York City that features trees native to that land from precolonial times. Sonfist’s work focuses on environmental conservation and a return to nature.
4. 4. James Turrell: Born in 1943, Turrell began exploring how to use light and space in his art in the mid-1960s. While experimenting with skyspaces—meticulously designed rooms that open to the sky—in 1977, Turrell began his largest project, Roden Crater. Created inside an extinct volcano in northern Arizona, Roden Crater features tunnels and apertures illuminated by natural light. Turrell has continued his giant Roden Crater project for decades while creating other influential pieces around the globe.
5. 5. Michael Heizer: The son of a renowned field archeologist, Heizer grew up with an interest in ancient monuments. In 1969, he moved 240,000 tons of sandstone and rhyolite to create Double Negative, an earthwork consisting of two 50-foot cuts into the cliff edges of Mormon Mesa in Nevada. Heizer’s Levitated Mass (2012), a 340-ton boulder resting above an outdoor walkway, is featured at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. During the 1970s, Heizer began work on City, a collection of massive concrete shapes in the Nevada desert inspired by ancient civilizations and Native American mound buildings.
6. 6. Nancy Holt: Along with her husband Robert Smithson, Holt was a leader of the land art movement. Her most famous work of art is Sun Tunnels (1976), a collection of four massive concrete tunnels in Utah’s Great Basin Desert arranged to line up with the sunrise and sunset on the summer and winter solstices. Holt experimented with time and space throughout her long career.
7. 7. Andrew Rogers: Born in 1947, Rogers is an Australian artist who has used his knowledge of sculpture and ancient designs to break new ground with land art across several decades. His most impressive work is Rhythms of Life (1998), the world’s largest land art project comprising 51 sculptures across all seven continents, including the Bunjil Geoglyph (2006), a stone sculpture of a giant bird representing a creator deity.

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