Archinect - News

Artist Mary Miss gains injunction against Des Moines Art Center's planned land art removal

2024-05-06T11:41:00-04:00

The lawsuit filed by artist Mary Miss in federal court in Iowa last month has gained a preliminary injunction over the alleged breach of contract stemming from the Des Moines Art Center’s planned removal of her outdoor sculpture piece Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1996). The news was shared by The Cultural Landscape Foundation last week following the announcement of her legal challenge in April. Miss had been attempting to stop museum officials from removing the piece from its grounds over maintenance concerns and said she was thankful to the court for issuing a temporary restraining order, which, she added, “opens the door to the consultations about the future of the site that were denied me.”

The 19-page ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa says the piece is, in fact, a “work of recognized stature” pursuant to the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA). Miss and her team now plan on defending its status further in order to establish a definition for ...

Artist Mary Miss files suit to stop demolition of outdoor installation at Des Moines Art Center

2024-04-09T17:42:00-04:00

Artist Mary Miss has filed a lawsuit in an ongoing dispute over the planned demolition of her outdoor installation Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1996) at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa.

A district court subsequently decided to issue a temporary restraining order against the institution’s plans, which were to be enacted on April 8th of this year.

Greenwood Pond-Double Site, Des Moines, IA, 1996. Photo © Mary Miss courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation

Miss, who is considered a leading figure of the Land Art movement, filed the legal challenge after The Cultural Landscape Foundation divulged the Art Center’s “secret plans” to deconstruct and remove the installation from its grounds over the deterioration of its materials and presumed adversity of potential repairs.

Greenwood Pond-Double Site, Des Moines, IA, Dec. 2023. Courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation

Miss is alleging a breach of contract as part of the suit, citing a 1994 agreement and seeking damages through a readi...

James Turrell's Roden Crater is hiring a construction manager for the iconic artwork

2023-08-16T10:45:00-04:00

Following last week’s look at an opening for a Project Manager at the Center for Zero Waste Design, we are using this week’s edition of our Job Highlights series to explore an opportunity on Archinect Jobs for a Construction Manager at the Skystone Foundation.

The role, based in Flagstaff, AZ, will see the successful candidate “work closely with the artist on all phases of the construction of the Roden Crater project, an unprecedented large-scale artwork created within a volcanic cinder cone by light and space artist James Turrell.” Qualifications held by the ideal candidate include a degree in Architecture with the ability to obtain a license in Arizona, and a proficiency in AutoCAD, Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Navisworks, and Adobe Creative Suite.

James Turrell. Image courtesy: Skystone Foundation

Why the role interests us

Roden Crater is one of the most famous pieces of landscape art in the United States. The site was acquired by Turrell in 1979, who has spent over four decades design...

Take a look at photos of Michael Heizer's 'City' ahead of its debut

2022-08-26T17:51:00-04:00

The long-awaited public opening of land artist Michael Heizer’s monumental earthwork City is just around the corner, and the Triple Aught Foundation, the group which manages its remote Lincoln County, Nevada site, has shared some amazing new photos that offer a sense of the scale and stasis of the massive sculpture which has taken 52 years and another $40 million to finish.

City © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome

Complex One and Complex Two, City. © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome

Complex Two, City. © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome

Critic Dave Hickey recently described it as "a gracious intervention in the desert...composed and complete."

LACMA Director Michael Govan reflected on its realization, stating: "Over the years I would sometimes compare Michael Heizer's City project to some of the most important ancient monuments and cities. But now I only compare it to itself. It's an artwor...

Michael Heizer’s land art masterpiece 'City' finally sets an opening date

2022-08-22T10:00:00-04:00

City, a vast complex of outdoor structures and landmasses the Land artist Michael Heizer began constructing in the desert of Nevada in 1970, will finally begin welcoming public visitors next month. The site’s opening on 2 September, more than 50 years after work at the site began, marks the fulfillment of Heizer’s most ambitious and career-defining project.

Get ready to weep (assuming you are among the select art tourists willing to travel to the site-specific installation, as Heizer intended): The 50-year saga surrounding the National Mall-sized sculpture is over, and the Triple Aught Foundation, which manages the site, will begin accepting up to six visitors a day in an outcome that has at times seemed impossible.

Heizer's masterpiece has been the subject of an Obama-era protective designation (a measure first proposed by the late Senator Harry Reid) and later the failed Trump Administration attempt to open up the 740,000-acre tract to mining and development. Plans were originally for the earthwork to be made public in 2020. LACMA director Michael Govan says it is "an artwork aware of our primal impulses to build and organize space."

As the artist, who began the piece in 1970, told the Los Angeles Times in 2012: "The size thing is not some gimmick or attention-getting trick but a genuine undercurrent of the work. Frank Gehry for ins...

Monumental sculptor Beverly Pepper has died at age 97

2020-02-05T18:50:00-05:00

Beverly Pepper, the multi-talented artist who dabbled in monumental sculpture, land art, painting, and site design, has passed away at age 97.

Over a career that stretches back over six decades, Pepper helped create a vast collection of large scale works that engaged materiality, form, gesture, composition, the human body, and nature all at once.

Photo of Perre's Ventaglio III, a sculpture by Beverly Pepper located in the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. Image courtesy of mcfisher.

Among the artist's most well known works are the various "sentinel" monoliths that are erected around the world, including at the Civic Center Federal Plaza in New York City and in Todi, the Italian town where Pepper lived for much of her later life. Some of these structures rise to over 30-feet in height and present a variety of evocative forms and geometries in materials that include polished stainless steel, stone, bronze, and cast iron.

A tile-clad mound (top) and seating (bottom) designed for th...

James Turrell to finally open his latest art installation at Roden Crater in the Arizona Desert

2019-01-15T09:02:00-05:00

For the past 40 years, artist James Turrell has been working on creating his most massive project yet, a largely unseen network of installations built inside a dormant volcano in the Arizona desert. The ambitious land artwork aims to turn the 2.5-mile wide crater into a series of rooms and tunnels designed for contemplation of light, landscape and time.

At 75, Turrell has spent over half his life sculpting the Roden Crater into his magnum opus, which is only about a third of the way done. According to the WSJ. Magazine, a new deal with Arizona State University promises to have the project open to the general public for the first time.

Roden Crater.

Working with the ASU Foundation and Skystone Foundation—the crater’s nonprofit umbrella—the revised masterplan is expected to complete within the next five years. A long-range strategy for the site, made urgent after Turrell's June health scare, is also being formulated by ASU, who will incorporate the project into its academic programmi...

Land surrounding Michael Heizer’s "City" could lose national monument protection under Trump Administration

2017-07-31T14:55:00-04:00

As City—Michael Heizer’s vast Land Art installation in the Nevada desert—nears completion, the fate of the federally protected land surrounding it could soon be decided. Ryan Zinke, the US Interior Secretary, visited the state on Sunday, 30 July, as part of a review of 27 national monuments ordered by President Donald Trump, which could result in some of these lands being reopened to development.

"A number of museums banded together to call for the site’s preservation," The Art Newspaper explains the background of City's current surroundings (previously also on Archinect), "and in 2015, Obama created the Basin and Range National Monument, which covers 704,000 acres in southern Nevada’s Lincoln and Nye counties, including the land surrounding City and several Native American rock art sites. The next year, he created the Gold Butte National Monument, which covers 300,000 acres in Clark county."

A monument to outlast humanity

2016-08-30T12:48:00-04:00

“My good friend Richard Serra is building out of military-grade steel. That stuff will all get melted down. Why do I think that? Incans, Olmecs, Aztecs—their finest works of art were all pillaged, razed, broken apart, and their gold was melted down. When they come out here to fuck my ‘City’ sculpture up, they’ll realize it takes more energy to wreck it than it’s worth.”

Heizer, a pioneer of the earthworks movement, began “City” in 1972. A mile and a half long and inspired by ancient ritual cities, it is made from rocks, sand, and concrete mined and mixed on site.

“ ‘City’ is one of the most important works of art to have been made in the past century. Its scale and ambition and resolution are simply astonishing.” Its unseen status has made the place almost mythic—it’s art-as-rumor, people say—and has turned the artist, who became known for chasing off unwanted visitors and yanking film out of cameras, into a legend, or a “Scooby Doo” villain." -Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.

Heizer, who is given to playful lamentation, complains about what New York is turning him into: “A decaffeinated, used-up, once-was quick-draw cowboy, a sissy boy who eats at Balthazar for lunch.” At such moments, he is a cartoon roughneck, swatting at his own amusement like a housefly. “Chemical castration—doesn’t happen all at once,” he sa...

Monumental land art emerges in Montana's new Tippet Rise Art Center

2016-08-12T13:36:00-04:00

"They have strong architectural properties: they create space, they provide shelter and shade, they change the thermal and acoustical properties of the surrounding context and thus they enable new activities and programs to take place. But also, they can live empty without looking like empty buildings...”

Land art installations stand majestically against the pristine Montana landscape at the Tippet Rise Art Center, a working sheep ranch turned art destination that opened in June about an hour away from Billings and 2.5 hours north of Yellowstone. Ensamble Studio principals Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa briefly talk about the collaborative design process behind the Center's masterplan and the landscape works they created.

How to ‘Earthwork’ an Exhibition Space: Interiors Land Art Experiences

2016-06-08T12:00:00-04:00

Early Land Art practices emerged as a protest against the commercialization of art at the end of the 1960’s and as a subsequent refusal of the museum or the gallery as a setting for artistic activity. (Oppenheim).

In addition to the examples in the article, my memory bank recalls one of my favorites, a 1986 Chris Burden piece at the inaugural show of then Temporary Contemporary, Exposing the Foundation of the Museum, 1986. MoCA-LA.