Texas Tech University

Land Arts of the American West Image Archive

Land Arts of the American West Image Archive is a yet untapped repository of nearly 250,000 digital images created over the course of seventeen field seasons, ten while the program has operated from Lubbock. The archive contains a wealth of information about the evolving history of the program, sites visited, field experience, and student works. Yet, currently, there is no mechanism for this material to be available to students, scholars, or the general public.
This project seeks support to strategize, develop and compose a large grant proposal to process the archive as a digital project in the Texas Tech Libraries Architecture Image Collections.
Potential large grants under consideration from the National Endowment for the Humanities are the NEH Humanities Initiatives at Hispanic-Serving Institutions and the NEH Digital Projects for the People.
Resources from the CH Humanities Fellowship will support an environmental scan of sustainable, engaging, and innovative digital projects and platforms and identification of stakeholders, advisors, and research methodologies, leading to the creation of grant proposals. This work will be done in partnership with the Texas Tech Architecture Library.
Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech is a transdisciplinary field program that investigates the intersection of human construction and the evolving nature of the planet. The program leverages immersive field experience in the desert southwest as a primary pedagogic agent to support research that opens horizons of perception, probes depths of inquiry and advances understanding of human actions 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 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 make work in response to their experience, which is exhibited at the Museum of Texas Tech University to conclude the field season.
The Land Arts program has been the subject of and featured in multiple books and publications, a documentary film, and in the New York Times. Making the Land Arts Image Archive accessible will have active and powerful impacts for Texas Tech University, the Libraries, the College of Architecture, and the Land Arts program as it contributes to the ongoing development of the digital humanities.