This summer and fall, a group of New Mexico arts organizations have joined together to present LAND/ART, which will explore relationships of land, art, and community through exhibitions, site-specific art works, lectures, and a culminating book. Focusing on “environmental” or “land” art, the collaboration seeks to address our changing relationship to nature, and to offer a new or previously unconsidered understanding of the place in which we live.

Historically, New Mexico has been a place where the intersection of nature and culture is at issue. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the American Southwest was the location of the first generation of Land Art or Earthworks, including such major projects as Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field and Charles Ross’ Star Axis in New Mexico, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in Utah, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona. Since then, the Land Art genre has been subsumed under the more general term “environmental art” which is a highly diverse and vital feature of contemporary art around the world. This new genre recognizes that what we now think of as the “environment” has broadened to include the global community, the microscopic world, and cyber space as well as wilderness, the urban environment and suburban sprawl. It includes ecological activism, reclamation and remediation projects, and ephemeral site-specific performances, among many other approaches, all of which have in common art and artists that respond to features of our natural environment.

Read the latest: LAND/ART in Art in America!

New! download LAND/ART Guide to projects & programming

download press release

download symposium weekend press release

download the downtown arts & entertainment guide 2009

Support LAND/ART and receive smudge studio's artist edition of 30 postcards depicting Limit Case landscapes and land uses encountered on their recent journey in the Southwest. To view the postcards and order your set of 30 for a tax deductible donation of $20, please visit BOOKS.

Images top: Illana Halperin, Boiling Milk (Solfataras), c-print on board; Anne Cooper, Anitya, photo by Basia Irland;
Michael P. Berman, from the Grasslands series; Nicole Dextras, Camellia Contessa, fiber based print;
Shelley Niro, Tree, video still; Nina DuBois, Untitled, from the series Dechets digest(es)