SITE Santa Fe will host a series of lectures on Land Arts including a talk with special guests Nancy Holt and William L. Fox, as well as The Three P’s of Land Art: Principles, Poetics and Politics in three lectures by Laura Steward, Joanne Lefrak and Janet Dees.



Tuesday, September 8, 6pm
Lecture, Art of the Anthropocene, with William L. Fox



In September, SITE will host William L. Fox, a writer, independent scholar, and poet whose work is a sustained inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape. Fox is currently the director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art and he will present a talk, entitled Art of the Anthropocene. The talk will draw a line from Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist and explorer, and Frederic Church, an American landscape painter of the Hudson River School, in the nineteenth century, through twentieth-century New Topographics and Earthworks, then into the definition of the Anthropocene and the spread of Land Arts. The Anthropocene begins in the 1790s when the burning of fossil fuels creates a global signature, a strata of residue from greenhouses gases that marked when humans became the most pervasive geomorphological force on the planet. The beginning of the era was also marked by the birth of Earth systems science, and a concurrent evolution in the artistic representation of the planet from landscape art to land art, from making pictures of the land to using land itself and our effects on it to make art. More details on William L. Fox


Tuesday, October 27, 6pm
Lecture by Nancy Holt



In October, SITE will host Nancy Holt, a pioneer in site-specific public sculpture and a leading figure in the land arts movement. Holt will show MONO LAKE, a 20-minute video by Holt and Robert Smithson. The original Super 8 film and Instamatic slides were shot by Holt, Smithson and Michael Heizer in 1968 and were later transferred to video. In 2004 Holt edited the video into its final form and structure. In addition, Holt will show her documentary photographs of early trips with artist friends from 1966-69, exploring the urban edges of New York, the Western desert, Florida, and the Yucatan. Holt will also discuss her photographic series of works including: Graveyard Series, 1968 from Lone Pine, CA and Virginia City, NV; Trail Markers, 1969 Dartmoor, England; Concrete Visions, 1967; and Over the Hill, 1968. More details on Nancy Holt


November 2009

In November, SITE Santa Fe will present its Contemporary Art in Context Series on the topic of land arts. SITE’s Contemporary Art in Context Series is a program intended to ground the art of today in art history. In this three part lecture series, SITE’s curatorial and education staff will discuss The Three P’s of Land Arts: Principles, Poetics, and Politics. The first lecture, presented by SITE’s Phillips Director, Laura Steward, will explore the principles of land arts beginning with the rise of the land arts movement in the 1970s and will focus on artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. The second lecture, presented by Joanne Lefrak, SITE’s Education and Catalogue Manager, will investigate the poetics of land arts in which artists create their environmental works for evocative or aesthetic purposes. Lefrak will examine artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long. The final lecture, presented by Janet Dees, SITE’s Thaw Curatorial Fellow, will investigate the politics of land art, delving into topics such as the environmental impact of land arts. More details on SITE speakers

Tuesday, November 3, 6pm
Contemporary Art in Context, The Three P’s of Land Art: Principles, Poetics and Politics
Principles by Laura Steward

Tuesday, November 10, 6pm
Contemporary Art in Context, The Three P’s of Land Art: Principles, Poetics and Politics
Poetics by Joanne Lefrak

Tuesday, November 17, 6pm
Contemporary Art in Context, The Three P’s of Land Art: Principles, Poetics and Politics
Politics by Janet Dees


For more information about SITE Santa Fe visit www.sitesantafe.org

SITE Santa Fe
1606 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM 87501
t. 505-989-1199

image: Photo by Herbert Lotz