Texas Tech University

Land Arts

February 17-April 23, 2017

Point Sublime, North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Arizona, 26 September 2016.

The exhibition culminates the semester-long transdisciplinary field program Land Arts of the American West with the Texas Tech University College of Architecture presenting documents, objects and constructions by students Roberto Becerra, Liz Janoff, Matthew Mendez, Kaitlin Pomerantz and Claudia Vásquez. Land Arts is "semester abroad in our own backyard" where architects, artists, and writers camp for two months while traveling 5,820 miles overland to experience major land art monuments—Double Negative, Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels—while also visiting sites expanding our understanding of what land art might be such as pre-contact archeology of Chaco Canyon, scientific exploration at the Very Large Array, and military-industrial operations in the Great Salt Lake Desert.

On Bonneville Salt Flats with Matt Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah, 19 September 2016.

To negotiate the multivalent meaning of these places and shed light on strategies to aid their comprehension we invite the wisdom of field guests—writers, artists and interpreters—to join specific portions of our journey. 2016 field guests included Center for Land Use Interpretation director Matt Coolidge, art collective Post Commodity, and writer Lucy Lippard among many others. Land Arts hinges on the primacy of first person experience and the realization that human-land relationships are rarely singular.

Camp at Twin Buttes, New Mexico, 14 October 2016.