Sun Tunnels is an artwork by Nancy Holt, completed in 1976, consisting of four large concrete tubes, laid out in the desert in an open X configuration. The nine foot diameter, 18 foot-long tunnels are pierced by holes of varying size that correspond with the pattern of selected celestial constellations. There is a tunnel for Draco, Perseus, Columba and Capricorn. The tunnels line up with the rising and falling sun of the summer and winter solstices. The Center for Land Use Interpretation Database
Dark Star Park, Arlington Virginia
Arlington's first major commissioned art project, Dark Star Park features large spheres designed to resemble fallen, extinguished stars. One section of the park contains spheres and poles with shadow-images inset in the ground. Each year on August 1, the day (in 1860) that William Henry Ross acquired the land that became Rosslyn, the actual shadows align with the shadow-images at 9:32 am.
Emerging in the early 1970s amid burgeoning new genres of art making including land art, performance art, film and video, and feminist practices, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta developed a deeply personal, experimental, and largely ephemeral oeuvre consisting chiefly of performative actions that she described as “earth-body sculptures.”
The Silueta series—hundreds of earth-body works and related photographs and films—constitutes the core of Mendieta’s project. Based initially on her own body and silhouette, the Siluetas developed into a panoply of archetypal goddess figures and eventually more universal human forms and incorporated a unique blend of ritual effects drawn from diverse religions.
Born in Cuba, Mendieta came to the United States as a refugee in 1961 at the age of 12. The trauma of separation from her family, culture, and homeland became the bedrock of the artist’s practice, which was rooted in physical and spiritual connections between the body and the natural world. She wrote, “I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced me. It is through my sculptures that I assert my emotional ties to the earth and conceptualize culture.”
An intensely productive period of travel to Cuba, where Mendieta felt her practice was reconnected with its origins, prompted drawings, etchings, and sculptures, in which, for the first time, her iconic goddess forms became permanent individual objects.
Land Arts of the American West, at the University of New Mexico, is an ongoing experiment and interdisciplinary model for creative and critical arts pedagogy based in place. This program puts students in direct contact with place of the American Southwest through Field Investigations, Research, Creative Production, and Public Presentation/Dissemination of projects. During the program, students travel extensively throughout the Southwest for up to 50 days, while camping and investigating environmental sites, human habitation systems, and questions facing the region. Methodologies include the melding of direct experience, critical research, creative inquiry, interdisciplinary collaboration, and artistic production. Recent topics of investigations have focused on Watershed, US/Mexico Border, Foodshed, Utopian Architecture, Land Use, and Eminent Domain.
Land Arts of the American West is made possible, in part, by the generous contribution of Lannan Foundation.
Bill Gilbert started the Land Arts program at the University of New Mexico, in 2000, based on ten years of field programming at Acoma Pueblo and Juan Mata Ortiz, Mexico. In 2000, John Wenger served as co-director, contributing his experience of over 25 years in the wilderness of northern New Mexico and southeastern Utah. Between 2002 and 2006, the Land Arts program operated as a joint venture between Bill Gilbert (UNM) and Chris Taylor (UT). Professor Chris Taylor currently directs his own Land Arts program at Texas Tech University, http://landarts.arch.ttu.edu/. In 2005 and 2007, Erika Osborne co-directed the program at UNM. Catherine Harris joined the program, in 2009, as Art & Ecology faculty, and Jeanette Hart-Mann (Land Arts program 2000) assumed responsibility for the program field logistics. In 2012, Jeanette Hart-Mann began co-directing the program with Bill Gilbert.
The Land Arts of the American West (LAAW) program has received a five year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the creation and operation of the Land Arts Mobile Research Center (LAMRC). In 2015, LAMRC will be offering grants to students who have participated in the Land Arts of the American West field program. These grants will support current MFA thesis projects, international travel for research projects, as well as post-MFA research. Please see Grant Information and Application for details.
Moving Mountains - Land Arts of the American West, is a current film project by director and producer, Sam Wainwright Douglas of Big Beard Films (Citizen Architect), which explores the western phenomenon of Land Arts through the immersive, field-based, pedagogical experiment of the Land Arts of the American West program. The production of this film is still underway and seeking financial sponsorship through the Austin Film Society.
In 2009 the University of Texas Press published the book, Land Arts of the American West, presenting the ongoing collaboration in which artist Bill Gilbert and architect Chris Taylor investigate and create land art with their students. The book is organized around places visited over the first seven years of the program. The over 400 color photographs are accompanied by descriptive information about the site’s natural and human history; student journal entries presenting first-person experiences; essays by William L. Fox, Ann Reynolds, J.J. Brody, and Lucy Lippard; and interviews with Mary Lewis Garcia, Graciela Martinez de Gallegos and Hector Gallegos, and Matthew Coolidge. Woven throughout the text is a conversation amongst Gilbert, Taylor, and writer William L. Fox, covering the Land Arts program’s origins, pedagogic mission, field operations, interactions with guest lecturers, and future directions.
In 1972, Heizer began construction on a massive installation known as City in the rural desert of Lincoln County, Nevada. Since then, Heizer has grown increasingly shy of media attention, and has become known as something of a recluse. Nevertheless, he has continued to produce smaller-scale sculptures and paintings, which have been featured in numerous solo exhibitions (most prominently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). His works now appear in museums and public spaces worldwide. Source link here.
Desert Hydroglyphs are water capture basins for desert wildlife, holding from one to 5 gallons of rain or snowmelt. Many natural water sources have been taken over by humans, leaving wildlife to struggle to find water. Water is the most valuable element in the desert, and determines the extent of biodiversity in an area.
Safe roosting and nesting sculptures for hawks, owls and eagles, in areas where taking off and landing on older power poles may result in electrocution, or areas where human disturbance may make nesting difficult. Source link here and here.
''The Lightning Field,'' an enormous and astonishing installation of 400 lightning rods, a work of art so immense and so changeable that is occupies the desert landscape like a living thing.
The installation, completed in 1977, comprises 400 highly polished stainless steel poles with pointed tips, set 220 feet apart, in a grid. Because the land undulates slightly, the poles vary in height: the shortest is 15 feet and the longest is 26 feet 9 inches. The tips of all of them lie on a plane; a giant pane of glass could rest on all of them.
The grid is 25 poles (5,280 feet, or one mile) long and 16 poles (3,300 feet, or one kilometer) wide, and it takes about two hours to walk the perimeter,
''The land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work,'' Mr. De Maria writes in the cabin notebook. He and his assistants -- Robert Fosdick and Helen Winkler were the principal associates -- scoured California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Texas by truck over five years before settling on the site, 11 1/2 miles east of the Continental Divide, elevation 7,200 feet.
Lightning must occur within about 200 feet of the installation, Mr. De Maria says in his notebook, before it can ''feel'' the poles and come down to earth there, something he says happens about 60 times a year, most often in August and September, when storms are most common.
Last image - Walter de Maria and Robert Fosdick in field car during The Lightning Field installation, New Mexico, October 1977. Photo: Helen Winkler Fosdick, DIA Art Foundation.
