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

by Valerie Roybal

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.

“We engage the communities and environments of the southwest, provide students with continuous, uninterrupted time in which to work, and surround them with a community of fellow voyageurs in the hope that the experience will be a catalyst for their work and a jump start for their careers,” says Program Director and Professor of Art and Art History Bill Gilbert.

With this idea to provide a field-based art educational experience at UNM, Gilbert founded Land Arts with John Wenger, retired professor of art at UNM, and Chris Taylor, formerly of the University of Texas at Austin. Funded by the Lannan Foundation, the program has been successful on a number of levels. “We started with an interest in the history of Land Art made by Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo cultures. As the program has developed, we have defined a set of contemporary issues on which to focus that build upon these historic cultural roots,” says Gilbert.

Recent participants of the program went on two journeys which included visits to ancient sites such as  Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, Wupatki Pueblo, and Moon House Ruin in Utah. Each year, students make a trip to Casas Grandes and Juan Mata Ortiz, Mexico. Additionally the program takes the students to major Earthworks including: The Lightning Field in western New Mexico, Roden Crater in Arizona, and Spiral Jetty in Utah. Says Gilbert, “We use this historical base to inform our focus on the ecologies and communities of our region. We also work with farmers and trackers to investigate local sources of food in the southwest, and we engage western towns like Deming, New Mexico and Wendover, Utah to gain a better understanding of western communities. We visit mines, dams, military bases, and scientific installations to expand our understanding of the way American culture has interacted with the environment.”

To take Land Arts to the next level, Gilbert is creating alliances with other educational institutions in the United States and abroad to expand into a network of field-based art programs. Partners include Chris Taylor, now teaching Architecture at Texas Tech University; former Land Arts student and instructor Erika Osborne, now at the University of West Virginia; Nathan Lynch at the California College of Art in San Francisco; and John Reid at Australia National University in Canberra.

And, as part of the program’s growth, Gilbert is developing the Land Arts Mobile Research Center to support research and publication of program participants. “One of the real benefits of the Land Arts program has come from the interactions in the field we provide for our students with professional artists, creative writers, and scholars. The Mobile Research Center would allow us to offer semester long residencies to these guests to continue their field based research at UNM and to interact with UNM students at sites in the field and on campus,” says Gilbert.

The Center would also provide post-MFAs grants to Land Arts graduates to pursue their research. “Post Docs are very common in the scientific disciplines and serve the important function of providing graduates with a year of two of support while they establish their credentials in the field. We need a similar model in the arts. The Center would provide a base from which our students could reengage the sites they first visited in the program and develop a body of work for publication/exhibition,” says Gilbert.

Over the years, the Land Arts curriculum has changed to reflect emerging interests in art and ecology and will continue to change in the years ahead. Concludes Gilbert, “it’s important to stay fluid and let our ongoing practice and research define where we need to focus next. We are in a period of great change in our culture and in our universities as a result. As the rigid walls between disciplines dissolve, a flexible approach that rapidly incorporates the results of each year’s experiments in essential.”

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