Land Arts of the American West encourages students to use the outdoors as their laboratory to explore and create.

In the late 1960, the practice of Land Arts or Earthworks emerged in the United States as a response to the commercialization and commodification of art. Land Art is made on site, often isolated, involving the land itself as not only location, but inspiration, material, and collaborator. Land Art exists in open space, outside the confines of a gallery or museum, and beyond the realms of a price tag or market value. It can be ephemeral and impermanent under the forces of nature, and it can be as enduring and seemingly indestructible as any mountain or landscape feature created by nature itself.

Since 2000, UNM is the home of Land Arts of the American West, a dynamic and progressive program providing students with a significant earth art experience. It is designed to take art students outside the boundaries of traditional classroom learning and studio practice and give them the unique landscape of the southwest as their laboratory to explore and create. full story...

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Up until recently, it was thought the Grand Canyon was approximately six million years old. Researchers in the Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico have recently contradicted this and discovered otherwise.

Using a technique called uranium-lead isotope (U-Pb) dating of water table-type speleothems or cave formations, researchers Victor Polyak, Carol Hill, and Yemane Asmerom, were able to determine the western portion of the Grand Canyon actually began to form some 17 million years ago.

That revelation, or “eureka moment” as Asmerom calls it, essentially proves the Grand Canyon to be three times older than originally thought. full story...