New Mexico’s land and cultures loom large in the art world, and the influences of the modernist era, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, the Taos School and Fritz Scholder, still define much of the state’s reputation. However, contemporary artists are continuing to take new approaches to engaging with the land, in contrast to traditional views of landscape as scenery. This year a group of New Mexico arts organizations are joining together to present LAND/ART 2009, exploring land, art and community through exhibitions, site-specific art works, a speakers series and a culminating book.

The Land Art movement emerged in the 1970s when some adventurous artists departed the New York gallery scene to make art in the open landscapes of the West. Today, Land Art encompasses the built, virtual and natural environments. The large-scale collaborative LAND/ART project explores the evolution of this vast international genre of art, with a focus on its particular relevance to New Mexico.

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.

More recent Land Art projects reflect the influence of evolving trends in feminism, post-modernism, technology, environmentalism and pop culture. Land Art has expanded from “bad boys with big bulldozers” to a much broader contextual approach of examining our past, present and future relationship with the environment—be it urban, wild, contrived, imaginary, ephemeral, ancient, degraded, restored, cyber, private or public. 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.

Technology and New Media

Artist and professor Bill Gilbert says, “Land Art is fundamentally taking people out of the gallery and into the environment.” Gilbert directs the Land Arts of the American West program at University of New Mexico, where he takes students out into the landscape for immersive experiences that merge art making and environmental awareness. Gilbert’s own work for LAND/ART centers around a Walk to Work following a straight line from his house in Cerrillos, New Mexico to his office at UNM, documented with a GPS device, video and mapping tools. The Albuquerque Museum of Art & History is hosting Experimental Geography, a group exhibition curated by Nato Thompson of the New York organization Creative Time, exploring the relationships between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth – with computer kiosks, sound and video installations, photography, sculpture and experimental cartography.

Sound artist Steve Peters is working on a project in the bosque of the Rio Grande Nature Center, capturing environmental sounds that he processes and interweaves with voices of writers, poets and artists, all to be heard as a sound installation at the Rio Grande Nature Center. This project, as well as Gilbert’s Walk to Work and Anne Cooper’s Anitya at Anderson Field, is part of SiteWorks organized by Kathleen Shields.

The Los Angeles based Center for Land Use Interpretation is creating a site-based exhibition about the landscape and technological sublime of New Mexico. It is presented in a Mobile Exhibition Unit and installed at an outdoor site in the Albuquerque area. Part orientation center, part destination, the space is a conceptual “point of departure” for exploring the inner and outer landscape of the region, with its superlative links to technology, sustainability, spirituality and rapture.

Based in Mountainair, New Mexico, THE LAND/an art site is organizing a series of gallery installations at 516 ARTS by artists Katherine Bash, Paula Castillo, Ted Laredo, David Niec and Mayumi Nishida. Each artist’s project is a small environment in itself, constructed to emphasize that in the present age of information and technology, our larger natural environment is inter-related with other types of environments we inhabit. The exhibition includes digitally simulated waterfalls, built environments that glow in the dark, and explorations of the division between day and night as observed in the night sky of New Mexico.

More recent Land Art projects reflect the influence of evolving trends in feminism, post-modernism, technology, environmentalism and pop culture. Land Art has expanded from “bad boys with big bulldozers” to a much broader contextual approach of examining our past, present and future relationship with the environment—be it urban, wild, contrived, imaginary, ephemeral, ancient, degraded, restored, cyber, private or public. 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.

Land Art and Activism

Photographer Michael P. Berman’s Grasslands series, featured at 516 ARTS, is about the endangered Chihuahuan Desert grasslands in New Mexico, Texas and the northern border of Mexico, where Berman has wandered into the desert without a compass to, in his words, “live deliberately.” He believes that how you see the land comes down to what you value. “I believe art has a greater potential for meaning when it serves some purpose. People have started to recognize these lands as significant and this is something art can help along. If anything my work is to generate small symbols that reveal the greater complexity of things.”
Artist/activist Anne Cooper is creating Anitya, an ephemeral artwork at Los Poblanos Fields, a local open space she helped preserve for agriculture. Her piece is comprised of raw clay bowls containing seed balls, visible over the seasons as they dissolve, sprouting crops and leaving behind red stains on the earth. Sculptor Basia Irland is creating site-specific ice books embedded with local seeds and giving them to people to disperse into regional bodies of water. As she works on this project titled receding/reseeding at the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, she dialogues with the public about the importance of local and international water issues. Guest artist Patrick Dougherty, internationally recognized “stick’” artist, is building an intricate outdoor artwork made of sticks on the grounds of Bosque School, which is designing a new curriculum based on the work of ecologist Aldo Leopold. Dougherty’s project will merge Land Art and environmental education by involving students and families in the art making process.

Global Perspectives

Artist Erika Blumenfeld focuses on the distinct and sublime phenomena of light, sky, and sound in the Arctic and Antarctica in a video and photo-based installation from her journeys to the Poles. In the exhibition Here & There: Seeing New Ground at 516 ARTS, Ontario-based artist Shelley Niro comments upon the inhumanity of global warfare and environmental destruction in her video Tree. Additional artists from New Mexico and across the United State and Canada include Krista Elrick, Dana Fritz, David Taylor, Jo Whaley, Christopher Robbins, Lu Sage, Rebecca Belmore, Bonnie Devine, Lori Blondeau, Erica Lord, Catalina Delgado Trunk, Ward Shelly and Alex Schweder.
For more information about LAND/ART, visit www.landartnm.org

Thanks to Suzanne Sbarge, Executive Director of 516 ARTS in Albuquerque.

Originally appeared in The Collector’s Guide to Santa Fe, Taos and Albuquerque - Volume 23