Land Arts 2022 Exhibition

Land Arts 2022 Exhibition culminates the semester-long transdisciplinary field program Land Arts of the American West presenting documents and constructions by students Ty Cary, Elise Coleman, Macaella Gray, Walker Guinnee, Miranda Klein, Emily Lee, Megan McKenzie, and Zoe Roden. Within the Texas Tech University Huckabee College of Architecture, Land Arts is a “semester abroad in our own backyard” where architects, artists, historians, and writers camped for fifty nights while traveling 5,522 miles overland to experience major land art monuments—Double Negative, Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, The Lightning Field—while also visiting sites expanding our understanding of what land art might be such as pre-contact archeology of Chaco Canyon, scientific exploration at the Very Large Array, and military-industrial operations in the Great Salt Lake Desert. To negotiate the multivalent meaning of these places and shed light on strategies to aid their comprehension we invite the wisdom of field guests—writers, artists, and interpreters—to join specific portions of our journey. 2022 field guests included Matt Coolidge and Aurora Tang of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, artist-filmmaker Deborah Stratman, musician, artist Dionne Lee, and Cabinet magazine editor Sina Najafi among many others. Land Arts hinges on the primacy of first-person experience and the realization that human-land relationships are rarely singular.