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To celebrate Earth Day’s 50th anniversary, ARTnews has assembled a list of the best environmentalist artworks. Below, a guide to the most incisive works focused on land rights, ecological ...
Art for a Healthy Planet is ART 2030’s annual advocacy campaign that raises awareness for the critical issues of climate, biodiversity and health of our planet. Join us in inspiring people to act for our shared future across three major touch-points, with the power of art: Earth Day April 22.
First launched and initated by ART 2030 in 2020, the Art for a Healthy Planet digital campaign continues to call for urgent action to secure a sustainable future for people and the planet, through the power of art.
- Summary of Earth Art
- Key Ideas & Accomplishments
- Beginnings of Earth Art
- Earth Art: Concepts, Styles, and Trends
- Later Developments - After Earth Art
Earth art, also referred to as Land art or Earthworks, is largely an American movement that uses the natural landscape to create site-specific structures, art forms, and sculptures. The movement was an outgrowth of Conceptualism and Minimalism: the beginnings of the environmental movement and the rampant commoditization of American art in the late ...
The favored materials for Earthworks were those that could be extracted directly from nature, such as stones, water, gravel, and soil. Influenced by prehistoric artworks such as Stonehenge, Earth a...Earth artists often utilized materials that were available at the site on which their works were constructed and placed, honoring the specificity of the site. Locales were commonly chosen for parti...The rejection of traditional gallery and museum spaces defined Earth art practice. By creating their works outside of these institutions, Earth artists rebuffed the commodity status these venues co...Extending Minimalist and Conceptual Ideas
The late 1960s and 1970s was one of the most experimental periods in the history of Western art with many concurrent movements and artists working simultaneously in more than one style, making it sometimes difficult to definitively attach stylistic labels to works from the period. The ethos of Earth art, for example, shared certain characteristics with Minimalism, including its concerns with how objects occupied their space; the interaction of humans with works of art; and, especially, simpli...
The 1960s and Virginia Dwan
Earth artists were typically products of the Vietnam era, many of whom had been drafted to fight in the war and were college educated through the G.I. Bill. Most, like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, began their careers as painters. Smithson's first paintings evolved from figurative abstractions to geometrical canvases, and then eventually to sculpture. In 1966, Smithson began showing with the influential gallerist Virginia Dwan, who would shape the Earth art movement significantly. At th...
Institutional Exhibitions and Global Ambitions
In February of 1969, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University became the first American museum to show an exhibit of Earth art, entitled simply, Earth Art. The works were displayed both at the museum and throughout the grounds of Cornell's campus in Ithaca, thus providing an institutional setting for works that would continue to question the commodity status of art, particularly those works placed on the campus which served to blur boundaries between the object and its conte...
Site-specificity and Environmentalism
Smithson delineated the concepts of "Site" and "Nonsite" to designate theoretical differences in the physical context of work produced. "Nonsite" was termed as an "indoor earthwork" and indicated a piece that could be exhibited in a gallery setting, displacing natural materials from their original sites with accompanying drawings or photographs. "Site" referred to those works created outside the gallery infrastructure in site-specific locales with materials taken from that location. Smithson'...
Decay
Earth artists were influenced by prehistoric and ancient monuments such as Stonehenge and Native American burial mounds that were monumental in size and scale. Heizer experienced these prehistoric sites firsthand as a child, visiting various excavations with his father, who was an archaeologist. The prehistoric monuments, by means of their continued existence incorporated the passage of time through natural decay and erosion. The entropy of the materials, which were both manmade and organic,...
Invasive and Non-invasive
Earthworks are sometimes divided into those works that make great changes to the landscape and those that do not. Works in the former category generally require earth-moving equipment to make massive alterations to a site, such as Robert Heizer's Double Negative (1969-70). Those works that are non-invasive and are seen as more respectful to the land include Richard Long's A Line Made by Walking (1967), along with pieces by Andy Goldsworthyand Alan Sonfist.
During the mid-1970s, the recession impacted the funding of Earth art dramatically. Many artists were dependent on patrons to purchase expensive tracts of land to complete large-scale work. In addition to the economic slump, Robert Smithson's sudden death in 1973 while surveying possible sites in Texas changed the momentum of the movement. Those wh...
Apr 22, 2020 · Today we’re supporting the launch of Earth perspectives, a new artwork conceived by Olafur Eliasson for Earth Day 2020 and Serpentine Galleries. Nine images feature nine different views of the Earth.
Smithson's sculptures of the mid 1960s maintain a strong resemblance to the Minimalist installations of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris. Painted steel works such as Plunge (1966), Alogon #2 (1966), and Terminal (1966), employed industrial materials, geometric forms, and a restricted palette.
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Robert Rauschenberg designed the first Earth Day poster to benefit the American Environment Foundation in Washington, D.C., and it was published in an edition of 10,300 by Castelli Graphics, New York. Using the bald eagle as the dominant image, the artist symbolically placed the United States at the center of a global problem.
