Probing the Earth: Contemporary Land Projects
John Beardsley, curator
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. and tour, 1977-78
Only the second major museum exhibition to focus on land art (the first was at the Andrew Dickson White Museum at Cornell in 1969), this exhibition showcased 70 photographs, drawings, models, and related sculptures that documented completed projects and proposed works by 10 artists who actively engaged the landscape in works that continuously unfolded with the forces of nature.
It focused on the large-scale projects of artists such as Richard Fleischner, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Robert Morris, Charles Ross, and Robert Smithson. It also included documentation of more picaresque, ephemeral works by Richard Long and Charles Simonds, and two artists who might have been dismissed as “mere gardeners” at the time, Harvey Fite, creator of the remarkable stacked bluestone environment Opus 40 in Saugerties, New York, and James Pierce, author of a “garden of history” at Pratt Farm in Clinton, Maine. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue and traveled to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and the Seattle Art Museum.
IMAGES from the Exhibition Catalogue
