Work in Progress with Shawn Skabelund
Flagstaff-based artist Shawn Skabelund returns to the storm-swept ravine that birthed his latest show—and explains what a squirrel stick is—in an intrepid studio visit.
September 26, 2024
Land Art
EssayTexasVol. 10 Radical Futures
Farewell to Giants: The Uncertain Futures of Two Crumbling Land Art Works
Jon Revett compares and contrasts two monumental works of art, Amarillo Ramp and Cadillac Ranch, and discusses their possible futures.
September 06, 2024
Is Teresita Fernández’s SITE Santa Fe Show with Robert Smithson a Duel—or an Act of Generosity?
Iconoclasm is a mercy in Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson, clearing the view of both conceptual artists and their groundbreaking legacies.
August 27, 2024
Reaching for the Light: Daniel Hawkins’s Wild West Dream of a Desert Lighthouse
Daniel Hawkins's surreal, fifty-foot Desert Lighthouse is a glowing, perplexing beacon in the desolate Mojave Desert, on the site of ecological catastrophe.
May 21, 2024
Groundswell at the Nasher Expands the Conversation Around Land Art to Include a Multiplicity of Perspectives
Groundswell: Women of Land Art features twelve artists—some names familiar, some fresh—all working concurrently yet in the shadow of their male Land Art counterparts.
September 18, 2023
FeatureSouthwestVol. 8 Medium + Support
Intervention and Interconnection: How Should Artists Work With(in) the Environment?
Eco art is attracting a new generation of artists, but when working with the land, there’s a way to do it right and a way to do it wrong.
September 01, 2023
Land Suffering: The Unavailing Amelioration of Marguerite Humeau’s Orisons
The meek, reverent sculptures of Marguerite Humeau’s Orisons puncture 160 acres of unusable potato farmland in Hooper, Colorado, offering healing to a sandhill crane nesting ground undergoing megadrought.
August 10, 2023
Three Ways of Walking Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field
The Lightning Field—a vestige of the conceptual, minimalist, and earthwork movements of the mid-20th century by Walter De Maria—provides visitors with multiple, discrete ways of encountering the art object.
July 14, 2023
Artists React to the Legacy of Nevada Land Art in Modern Desert Markings
Modern Desert Markings at the Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas showcases contemporary takes on classic Land Art works by Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, and Jean Tinguely.
June 30, 2023
Desert Mirages: Desert X 2023 Attempts to Engage Problems Facing the Coachella Valley, With Varied Results
Ambitious as always, Desert X delivered on its promise to diversify its pool of participating artists—at the expense of conceptual coherence.
April 19, 2023
EssayTexasVol. 7 Finding Water in the West
Postcard from the Fair Park Lagoon
Artist Trey Burns on the Fair Park Lagoon, an iconic, yet overlooked, land art work by Patricia Johanson in Dallas, Texas.
March 03, 2023
Land Art Diary: Utah’s Earthworks Feel the Heat of Climate Change
Land Art scholar Hikmet Loe has visited and studied Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, and other earthworks for decades. She returned to a handful this summer—and found cause for concern.
August 16, 2022
UMFA Highlights Utah in the 1970s, From Spiral Jetty to Voter Rights
Curator Alana Wolf mines the University of Utah’s archives to backdrop the various occurrences of the 1970s—the formative decade in which Robert Smithson’s earthwork Spiral Jetty made its debut.
June 08, 2022
