PROGRAM
Land Arts of the American West is a semester-long interdisciplinary field program expanding the definition of land art through direct experience of the complex social and ecological processes that produce contemporary landscapes—from geomorphology to human construction in the inscriptions of petrogylphs, roads, dwellings, and monuments, as well as traces of those actions. Land art includes gestures both small and grand, directing our attention from potsherd, cigarette butt, and mark in the sand to human settlements, monumental artworks, and military/industrial projects such as hydroelectric dams and decommissioned airfields.
Each year Land Arts travels more than 8,000 miles to live and work for over fifty days in the landscape while visiting sites such as Chaco Canyon and Roden Crater, the Grand Canyon and Double Negative, the Wendover Complex of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Spiral Jetty, Marfa and Mata Ortiz, the Very Large Array and The Lightning Field.
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 Bill Gilbert and Chris Taylor, then at the University of Texas at Austin. In the fall of 2008 Taylor began teaching within the College of Architecture at Texas Tech University and now Gilbert and Taylor operate the program autonomously at the University of New Mexico and Texas Tech University. For information about the program at UNM see http://landarts.unm.edu/. In January of 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.
Operational and curricular material about Land Arts at Texas Tech can be found on the College of Architecture website. Later in year this site will be widely updated to include greater access to the program archive. Please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)for any additional information.