The Art Monitor

A Note from TS Project Art:

A recent article captured my attention by curator Leigh Arnold of the exhibition Ground Swell:  Women of Land Art.  The article, titled, Mother Earth is featured in the Winter 2024 issue of Art Desk magazine.  It felt like a nice counterpoint to the previous post on Michael Heizer’s five-decade long, in the making, land art sculpture in the Nevada desert entitled City.

The article, which is excerpted below, draws comparisons between the exhibiting contemporary women artists and how they approach their interventions upon and within the landscape, as compared to their male counterparts whose work and names have become synonymous with the movement.

Mother Earth by Leigh Arnold

“Among the most celebrated and mythologized art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, land art emerged during a highly experimental and boundary-breaking era. This art-making coincided with the fraught social and political upheavals that characterized much of the American post war period: the civil rights movement, environmental awareness, and the rise of second-wave feminism. With ties to minimalism and conceptual art, these artists placed less emphasis on the discrete object and turned their attention to the experience of the artwork, however fleeting or permanent that might be, to create works that were large in scale and located outside of typical urban art-world circuits.

For many years, historical art narratives of contemporary land art have been dominated by men: Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, and others whose earthworks have shaped the movement’s definitions around monumentality, permanence, and the “blank canvas” of seemingly remote or unpopulated landscapes. 

Land Art is all of these things, but it is not limited to them. This reductive characterization obscures the more subtle and less intrusive gestures that typify many examples of land art by women. The focus on men also positions land art as a tendency to control nature rather than collaborate with it, and it favors the destructive actions imposed on the landscape….. The focus on dominance and destruction as chief characteristics of land art also furthers sexist notions that land art required a degree of physical strength and cowboy bravado that according to certain scholars, women artists lacked. Such assumptions belie the inherent physicality of much of the work highlighted in Ground Swell: Women of Land Art, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas Texas.”