Please read carefully prior to completing your application.
About Land Arts
Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University is a transdisciplinary field program examining the evolutionary interaction between human actions and landscape formation. The program leverages immersive field experience as a primary pedagogic agent to support research that opens horizons of perception, probes depths of inquiry, and advances understanding of human impacts shaping environments. Land Arts attracts architects, artists, and writers from across the university and beyond to a “semester abroad in our own backyard” that travels 6,000 miles overland while camping for two months to experience major land art monuments—Double Negative, Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, The Lightning Field—while also visiting other sites to expand understanding of what land art might be, such as pre-contact archeology, military and industrial facilities, and contemporary infrastructure. Throughout the travels and on campus, participants interact with a wide range of guests as they make work in response to their experiences, which are exhibited at the Museum of Texas Tech University to conclude the field season.
Please visit the Land Arts Graduate Certificate page in the university catalog for more information.
Program Objectives
The primary learning and research objectives of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University are:
- To provide significant periods of time in diverse landscapes for participants to make work examining broad ranges of human interaction with Earth in the evolution of ecosystems, cultures and built environments.
- To promote a collaborative space for participants to operate as productive members of a collective with shared responsibilities for group survival, safety, and inquiry in demanding intellectual and physical contexts.
- To create an atmosphere of critical inquiry and creative learning through making that expands disciplinary limits of knowledge and connects broad modes of practice across the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences.
- To interpolate and test understandings of craft in the production of works, the practice of everyday life, and the rigors of fieldwork during overland travel.
- To develop a body of research within the landscape of the Americas building upon the collective history of Land Arts field experience and examining all forms of place.
- To foster the ability for participant, faculty, and professional research to develop simultaneously and in parallel through the creation of new works, exhibitions, publications, and other forms of dissemination.
Travel & Camping
Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University engages the landscape through direct exposure. Participants must be prepared for the rigors of road and wilderness. Spending two months traveling 6,000 miles throughout the American West to visit and make work in response to contemporary and pre-contact land art is to engage the fundamental difference between embodied and mediated education. Land Arts seeks to confirm the idea that if you bring participants out into the world instead of the world into the classroom, you can fundamentally change how we learn, create, and perceive our surroundings. In this context we strive to make deeper and more precise connections within our work and be inspired to create work that makes broader linkages outside of ourselves.
Land Arts curriculum is delivered while camping and traveling from site to site. The physical, intellectual, and emotional challenges of this experience are essential ingredients in the overall educational content of the program. It is critical to the success and survival of the group that each participant accepts the responsibilities of working with and for the group. Camp work (set up, cooking, cleaning, water hauling, breaking camp…) will be required of everyone. Participants will be responsible for their own individual camping gear and course materials (see Field Equipment List provided). Group gear (cooking equipment, water storage, kitchen shelter, mobile tech lab…) is provided by the program.