22 August 2010
Preparations
As Land Arts 2010 makes ready to begin a new field season, gear is cleaned and sorted in Lubbock, Texas. See our 2010 Itinerary for information about where we’ll be. And, check back to this site often. We’ll post image uploads from the field whenever we have a signal.
24 February 2010
2010 Admissions at Texas Tech
Opening The Cultivated Wilderness, or, What is Landscape? architecture critic Paul Shepheard reveals that “This book is about seeing things that are too big to see.” He goes on to provide three clear frames to orient our recognition: “The Wilderness of the book’s title is the world before humans appeared in it, and the Cultivation is everything we’ve done to it since. Landscape is another name for the strategies that have governed what we’ve done.” Investigating earthworks or land art is a way of mapping the intersection of geomorphology and human construction. Earthworks begin with the shape of the land and extend through the complex social and ecological processes that create landscape. Including the full array of human activity marking the planet, from petroglyphs to roads, dwellings, monuments and traces of those actions, earthworks show us who we are.
Since 2001 Land Arts of the American West has been developing as an interdisciplinary field program expanding the definition of land art and our relationship to landscape. Land Arts is a semester abroad in our own back yard. Connecting the pedagogic potential of travel with the rigors of field research.
Land Arts at Texas Tech University seeks to cultivate collective energy within an expanded interdisciplinary range of examinations from architecture, the built environment, public culture, literature, science, and geography to explorations of contemporary art practices.
THE COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE IS RECRUITING STUDENTS FROM ACROSS TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY AND BEYOND FOR LAND ARTS 2010.
Application information is available here: 20090313_land_arts_application.pdf. The following schedule will facilitate the application and selection process:
Information Meeting on Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 5:00pm in the Architecture and Art Courtyard. This meeting is for all students interested in applying to the program. We will review the program overview and application details.
Application Deadline is on Tuesday, March 30, 2010, 5:00pm in Room 709 of the Architecture Building.
Notification of Acceptance will occur on Tuesday, April 13, 2010.
For questions or additional information please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Land Arts 2009 Exhibition Documentation
Documentation of the Land Arts 2009 Exhibition held at the new LHUCA Warehouses in Lubbock, Texas,12 February to 7 March 2010. For additional information about the exhibition see Land Arts 2009 Exhibition.
Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Adrian Larriva, Marfa Social Chemistry Experiment, Adrianna Alter, Sleep Tight, with Meredith James Camera Obscura #1 and Salt Flat Still Life in the background, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Sean Cox, Ford E-350 Land Arts Edition, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Adrian Larriva, One to One: Lubbock, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Kyle Robertson, Horizon, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Jose Villanueva and Adrian Larriva, RE/CYCLE: CYCLE 3 (swag lamp), and Sean Cox, Texture Table, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Stephen Wollkind, Alpha, Beta, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Sean Cox, Forts, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Video loop showing Adrian Larriva, Eight Hundred and Twelve Licks, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Jason Fancher, Resupply, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Jose Villanueva and Adrian Larriva, RE/CYCLE: CYCLE 1 (lamp), and Adrianna Alter, An Experience in Photos and Pigments, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Jason Fancher, Salt Jeans, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Preliminary data prints from the laser scan of Double Negative, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
Jose Villanueva, Resupply, Land Arts 2009 Exhibition, Lubbock, Texas, 12 February 2010.
29 January 2010
Land Arts 2009 Exhibition
Land Arts camp at Cabinetlandia, east of Deming, New Mexico, 14 October 2009.
There is no “I” in Land Arts. Thriving in the desert requires community.
Texas Tech University College of Architecture and the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA) announce Land Arts 2009 Exhibition. An opening reception will take place from 6-9 p.m. February 12 at the new LHUCA Warehouses at 1001 Mac Davis Lane in Lubbock, Texas.
The exhibition culminates Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech, a semester-long interdisciplinary field program in the College of Architecture that expands the definition of land art through direct experience of the complex social and ecological processes that shape contemporary landscapes. These forces include everything from geomorphology to human construction, and cigarette butts to hydroelectric dams.
The Land Arts 2009 Exhibition will continue through March 7 and features the work of Adrianna Alter, Sean Cox, Jason Fancher, Meredith James, Adrian Larriva, Kyle Robertson, Jose Villanueva, and Stephen Wollkind. Work was made while camping in the landscape of the American West for 56 nights traveling 7,000 miles during the fall of 2009 with Chris Taylor and Brice Harris. The itinerary included: White Sands, Chaco Canyon, north rim of the Grand Canyon, Goshute Canyon, Double Negative, Sun Tunnels, Spiral Jetty, Center for Land Use Interpretation Wendover, Muley Point, Plains of San Agustin, The Lightning Field, Very Large Array, Gila Wilderness, Chiricahua Mountains, Cabinetlandia, Marfa, Presidio, and concluded with a symposium at the Land Heritage Institute in San Antonio.
The exhibition will launch with an opening reception on Friday, 12 February 2010 from 6 - 9 pm. There will be a closing reception in conjunction with the First Friday Art Trail on Friday, 5 March 2010 from 6 - 9 pm. The exhibition will be open for viewing by appointment and on Saturdays from noon to 5pm. To set up an appointment contact Chris Taylor by phone at 806-392-6147 or by email at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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About Land Arts
Land Arts was founded in 2000 at the University of New Mexico by Bill Gilbert with the assistance of John Wenger. From 2001 to 2007 the program developed as a collaboration co-directed by artist Bill Gilbert and architect Chris Taylor, then at the University of Texas at Austin. During this time Land Arts established a momentum of inquiry and production that has been the subject of many exhibitions and publications.
In 2007 Taylor extended the reach of Land Arts to Chile by leading an interdisciplinary conference in Santiago and a field expedition through the Atacama Desert. The enterprise is documented in the book Incubo Atacama Lab with texts in Spanish and English including a preface by Incubo, introductory essay by Taylor, excerpted field notes by writer William L. Fox, and essays from archeologist Flora Vilches, art historian Gonzalo Pedraza, architect Rodrigo Perez de Arce, geographer Pilar Cereceda, and glaciologist Andres Rivera. It is fully illustrated with photography by Jorge Brantmayer, Blake Gordon, Barbara Palomino, and Chris Taylor.
2008 marked a programmatic expansion for Land Arts with the arrival of Chris Taylor in Lubbock to join the faculty of Texas Tech’s College of Architecture. The Llano Estacado and the College of Architecture provide an ideal laboratory base for the program’s interdisciplinary work. Land Arts now operates autonomously at the University of New Mexico and Texas Tech. The 2009 Lubbock field crew was composed of architecture students and one post graduate from Yale (Meredith James, MFA Sculpture). Future years will include broader interdisciplinary involvement from students across the Texas Tech community in addition to participants from outside the university. The 2009 field season was made possible with generous operational support from Andrea Nasher.
In early 2009 the Nevada Museum of Art announced the creation of the new Center for Art + Environment and the acquisition of the archive of Land Arts of the American West. This collection will include artifacts from the development and creation of the program and a commitment to acquire ongoing Land Arts materials.
In 2009 the University of Texas Press published Land Arts of the American West, which recounts the history of collaboration between Bill Gilbert and Chris Taylor as they developed Land Arts. The book is organized around places they visit during field seasons each fall, which come alive through color photographs and descriptive information about natural and human history; first-person experiences from student journal entries; essays by William L. Fox, Ann Reynolds, J.J. Brody, and Lucy Lippard; and interviews with Matthew Coolidge, Mary Lewis Garcia, Graciela Martinez de Gallegos and Hector Gallegos. Woven throughout is a conversation between Taylor, Gilbert, and Fox, about the program’s origins, pedagogic mission, field operations, guests, and future directions.
About the College of Architecture
The College of Architecture at Texas Tech University is located in Lubbock where architectural education has been offered since 1927. The college includes 850 undergraduate, graduate and PhD students and 50 faculty members. Graduate certificate programs are offered in Historic Preservation, Visualization, Community Design, Rural Health Care Design, and Digital Design Fabrication, as well as an interdisciplinary doctoral program in Land-Use Planning, Management, and Design. To extend the academic offerings on campus every forth year student participates in directed summer study abroad offerings in places such as Berlin, Granada, Paris, Seville, and Verona. The introduction of Land Arts within the college offers tremendous opportunities to expand field study and connect teaching and research more directly to the landscapes we inhabit.
About the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts
The mission of the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts is to inspire and enrich our community by being a catalyst for the arts. Celebrating ten years of serving our community, LHUCA is proud to announce this fabulous addition of the Warehouses on Mac Davis Lane as part of the LHUCA Campus. Our campus, located on a two city block area of downtown Lubbock, is the heart of the cultural district. The campus includes the FireHouse Building with a state-of-the-art theatre and four exhibition galleries, the Helen DeVitt Jones Clay Studio, and the IceHouse that provides rehearsal, event and gallery spaces. The Graffiti Building, equipped with a classroom and teaching gallery space, will open in April of this year. The newly acquired Warehouses will provide alternative exhibition and studio spaces for creative works that reach beyond the traditional gallery presentation. Land Arts 2009 Exhibition will demonstrate the flexible use of this space and serve as a magnet for the cultural growth and educational dialog between creator and viewer. The Board of Trustees and staff of LHUCA invite you to join us in celebrating the redevelopment and renovation of the cultural heart of Lubbock.
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If you would like more information about Land Arts or to schedule an interview with Chris Taylor contact him by phone at 806-392-6147 or by email at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Additional information about the College of Architecture can be found by contacting Jess Schwintz at 806-742-3169, ext. 247 or visiting http://arch.ttu.edu, and the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts by visiting http://lhuca.org.
27 August 2009
Land Arts 2009 departs from Lubbock
Thursday, 27 August 2009, 7:00am
College of Architecture
Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX
Today the first Land Arts field season from Lubbock will begin as the group sets out for Twin Buttes, near White Sands, New Mexico. Detailed information about the itinerary can be found online at http://arch.ttu.edu/wiki/Land_Arts_2009_Itinerary and once there you can also view the program materials.
Whenever we have the ability to connect to a mobile network we will post Field Report entries to the Land Arts website. So check back often to keep tabs on our progress. A major website redesign at the end of this year will provide access to materials from our exploration and construction.
Contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for additional information (although note that while in the field access to electronic communication will be significantly limited).
Image: Rocket Number 9 takes off 2009.
01 May 2009
LAND/ART
LAND/ART
A collaborative exploration of land-based art in New Mexico
Events & exhibitions throughout June - November, 2009
with Symposium Weekend June 27-28, 2009 (see separate press release)
Multiple venues at indoor and outdoor sites around New Mexico
Albuquerque • Santa Fe • Mountainair
In the summer and fall of 2009 a group of New Mexico arts organizations will join together to present LAND/ART, exploring relationships of land, art and community through exhibitions, site-specific art works, a speakers series, performances, excursions 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, Charles Ross’ Star Axis in New Mexico, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 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 cyberspace as well as wilderness, the urban environment and suburban sprawl. It includes ecological activism, reclamation and remediation projects, ephemeral site-specific performances and many other approaches, all of which have in common art and artists that respond to features of our natural environment.
LAND/ART 2009 involves 20 presenting organizations in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Mountainair, New Mexico, and is coordinated by 516 ARTS. Participating organizations include the Albuquerque Museum, UNM Art Museum, THE LAND/an art site, the Center for Contemporary Arts, the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, SITE Santa Fe and many others. All LAND/ART 2009 programs are listed on the project web site www.landartnm.org, and will be included in the complete program guide which will be available in May 2009. The culminating LAND/ART book will be published by Radius Books (http://radiusbooks.org), and will be available in December 2009.
Additional information at: www.landartnm.org or by contacting Suzanne Sbarge, Project Coordinator, 516 ARTS, 505-242-1445, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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)
09 April 2009
Land Arts lecture at Yale
Measures of Time, Travel, and Space: exploring Land Arts of the American West
Monday, 13 April 2009, 10:30am-12:30pm
Yale School of Art
Sculpture Building, 36 Egdewood Ave, New Haven, CT 06511
In this lecture Chris Taylor will present Land Arts of the American West as a work that makes other works through a field program that investigates the intersection of geomorphology and human construction beginning with the land and extending through the complex social and ecological processes that produce contemporary landscapes. Taylor will discuss the underlying strategies organizing the program, the embodied knowledge it produces, and its extension into the Atacama Desert of Chile.
Chris Taylor is an architect, the director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University, a program he has developed with Bill Gilbert of the University of New Mexico since 2002. Together they are authors of the Land Arts of the American West book, which documents the history and development of the program and has just been published by the University of Texas Press.
The Incubo Atacama Lab project began when the curatorial exchange organization Incubo invited Chris Taylor to bring the working methods of Land Arts to Chile. The lab brought together a group of students and researchers from North and South America for a conference in Santiago and fieldwork in the Atacama Desert to examine earthworks and terraforming in the Atacama Desert and to create contemporary responses to the industrial use of land over time. A book documenting the project is available online at Amazon.com.
Image: Land Arts of the American West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).
25 March 2009
Reclamation of Post-Industrial Territories
RECLAMATION OF POST-INDUSTRIAL TERRITORIES: LAND ARTS AND THE INCUBO ATACAMA LAB
Friday, 10 April 2009, 2:00-4:00pm
Parsons The New School for Design
Aronson Gallery, 2 West 13 Street, 1st floor, New York, NY 10011
This event will address the reclamation of post-industrial landscapes, environmental impact of the practices of reclamation, and roles that architecture, art and design play in such processes. The panel will further discuss the field methods of Land Arts of the American West, and the Incubo Atacama Lab in Chile, as a case study. Joel Towers, Dean of the School of Design Strategies, and an Assoc. Professor of Architecture and Urban Ecology at The New School, will frame the panel by discussing the epistemological significance of post-industrial landscapes within the framework of Urban Ecology, and also the environmental impact of reclamation.
Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech, directed by Chris Taylor, is a field program that investigates the intersection of geomorphology and human construction beginning with the land and extending through the complex social and ecological processes that produce contemporary landscapes. The Incubo Atacama Lab project began when the curatorial exchange organization Incubo invited Chris Taylor to bring the working methods of Land Arts to Chile. The lab brought together a group of students and researchers from North and South America for a conference in Santiago and fieldwork in the Atacama Desert to examine earthworks and create contemporary responses to the industrial use of land over time. Panel respondent will be Carin Kuoni, Director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, who will also moderate the discussion.
The event is organized by the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design, in collaboration with “Into the Open: Positioning Practice,” the Venice Biennale US Pavilion Exhibit at Parsons, and with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics (The New School).
Participants: Joel Towers, Dean of the School of Design Strategies, and an Assoc. Professor of Architecture and Urban Ecology, Parsons, The New School; Chris Taylor, Director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University; Incubo, Santiago, Chile; Flora Vilches, Curator at Museo Arqueológico Gustavo Le Paige, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile; Carin Kuoni, Director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School.
Additional information about Incubo Atacama Lab can be found online at http://earthworkslab.org.
Image: Oficina Salitreria Properidad, Chile, 12 Oct 2007 by Chris Taylor.
Land Arts at the ACSA Annual Meeting
Traction and Slippage
Panel presentation by Chris Taylor
Saturday, March 28, 2009, 10:30am-12:30pm
Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Annual Meeting
Hilton Portland, 921 SW Sixth Avenue, Portland, Oregon
Chris Taylor is participating in a critical conversation and the ACSA Annual meeting titled “On Fingerprints in the Act of Making” moderated by Peter Waldman and also including: Santiago R. Perez, Ann Sobiech Munson, Jon Wenberg, Peter A. Schneider, Robert Corser, Magdalena Garmaz, Robert Adams, Kristi M Dykema, Julian Bonder, Jodi S Polzin, Helene Renard, Kathryn Rogers Merlino, and Thomas L. Di Santo.
Taylor will present Land Arts of the American West as a model for reading beyond singular authorship and contribute to a dialogue that seeks to articulate zones of traction and slippage in our relationship with the physical character of landscape. The selection of sites encountered by Land Arts underscores the generative potential of reading earthworks through interdisciplinary lenses. Earthworks first appear as a relatively straightforward progression of artists moving outside the studio and gallery to make work directly in, and of, the landscape. The experience of this work on the ground offers an expanding range of interpretations. We learn for example that beyond the mile-by-kilometer boundary of The Lightning Field efforts to preserve the view-shed from encroaching development involve buying up surrounding acreage. Out in the landscape distinctions between art, the built environment, and politics, erode requiring holistic readings unbound by the limitations of disciplinary isolation. Another example is the way the Spiral Jetty is marked by the journey to it, past the Golden Spike monument, through cattle ranches, around the end of Rozel Point past what’s left of century old ruins of oil exploration to arrive at a work that must be walked to experience—even if it’s underwater. As is the case with most land art those factors, including the distant view, immediate weather, the color and texture of the surrounding landscape, all become part of the work. To crop the event, framing an object in an image, is to miss the very essence of the work. Needless to say, things in the field are much messier than they appear.
It is essential to move beyond distinct authors and objectified work titles. Following the logic of J.B. Jackson we need to examine the totality of landscape, not just the isolated bits that catch our fancy. The critical angle of my perspective in locating our work of ‘transforming nowhere into now here’ is how these broader overlays of ecology, science, art, and archeology ask what will we make of these multivalent interconnections?
28 February 2009
Land Arts at the College Art Association Conference
SCRATCHES, ROADS, AND MONUMENTS: ground truth in Land Arts of the American West
Panel presentation by Chris Taylor
Saturday, February 28, 2009, 2:30-5:00pm
College Art Association Annual Conference, Los Angeles Convention Center, Concourse Meeting Room 407
Landscape historian J.B. Jackson taught us the road is more than a means of conveyance—it is also a place. He considered road and trailer park alongside monuments and formal estates. The designation of Roden Crater as a “natural observatory” to protect its dark skies, land acquisition around The Lightning Field to preserve its view shed, and the recent activism protesting exploratory oil drilling near the Spiral Jetty all demonstrate the complex overlays of land use in land art.
This presentation casts Land Arts of the American West as a work that makes other works, as a pliable registration between the geologic forces shaping land with the complex cultural and ecological actions defining landscape. Spanning deep history, ‘epic’ projects started in the 1960’s, and ephemeral works of today, Land Arts is a field program using direct experience to develop ground truth as a keen measure of landscape.