Robert Smithson

(American, 1938–1973)

Robert Smithson was a seminal American artist and writer known for pioneering the Land Art movement. His monumental earthen sculptures such as Spiral Jetty (1970), were inspired by the Minimalist work of his contemporaries, as well as geology, science fiction, and the concept of entropy. “The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum,” he once mused. “Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art.” Born on January 2, 1938 in Passaic, NJ, he briefly studied at the Art Students League in New York, where he began producing collages and paintings in the style of the Abstract Expressionists David Smith and Jackson Pollock. During the early 1960s, Smithson was introduced to Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, and his future wife Nancy Holt, their combined influence led him to pursue a significantly different art practice. Through the 1960s, Smithson produced works which employed both industrial and organic materials. While continuing his art practice, Smithson also wrote for Artforum and Arts Magazine, often switching between esoteric thoughts and concrete descriptions of art or landscapes. Having completed Spiral Jetty, Smithson embarked on a new earthwork project. Tragically, while surveying the new project site from the sky, his plane crashed, killing Smithson, the pilot, and his photographer, on July 20, 1973 in Amarillo, TX. Today, the artist’s works are held in the Dia:Beacon in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, among others.