Environmental art addresses ecological themes or is made with nature. Learn its history from Smithson to Goldsworthy, key artists, and how it tackles climate change.
In October 2025, a Sámi-Norwegian artist named Máret Ánne Sara installed a monumental sculpture in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. The work, titled Goavve, was built from reindeer hides, electrical cables, and LED lights, stretching the full 26-meter height of the hall. It addressed a specific ecological crisis: the freezing of reindeer pastures in Sápmi, the territory of the indigenous Sámi people, caused by climate change. Five consecutive years of unstable winter temperatures had created ice crusts that trapped lichen beneath the snow, starving reindeer. Sara's work connected this local catastrophe to a global pattern of environmental destruction, and she described it as relevant "for the entire world because it parallels extreme weather and ecological situations that are happening everywhere, in different forms." Read the full interview at The Art Newspaper.
Environmental art is art that addresses ecological themes or is made with natural materials and processes. It encompasses works made in the landscape, works made from natural materials, works that address environmental degradation, and works that collaborate with natural systems. The term overlaps with Land Art (Earth Art), but environmental art is broader: where Land Art primarily involves sculpting the land itself, environmental art also includes works that address ecological issues without necessarily being sited in nature. The movement emerged in the 1960s and has become one of the dominant strands of contemporary art as the climate crisis has intensified.
This entry covers what environmental art is, how it emerged and evolved, which artists defined it, and how it has responded to the ecological crisis of the 21st century.
Environmental art operates on a spectrum. At one end are works made directly in the landscape, sculpting earth, rock, and water into large-scale forms. At the other end are works made in galleries that address environmental themes through data, documentation, or symbolic materials. Some environmental artists work with natural processes as collaborators, allowing erosion, growth, decay, and weather to shape the work over time. Others use their art to protest environmental destruction, document ecological change, or propose alternative relationships between humans and the natural world.
The movement is distinct from earlier traditions of plein air landscape painting, which depicted nature as a scene to be observed. Environmental art does not represent nature from a distance. It engages with nature as material, subject, collaborator, or victim. A 2025 academic paper in Itinera traced the development of ecological art since 2000, arguing that practitioners have evolved "in a twofold direction: towards a manifest way of positioning themselves in relation to sustainability issues, while also exploring a set of postmodernist devices as societal remedies in the frame of biodiversity topics." Read the paper at Itinera.
Environmental art grew out of the Land Art movement of the late 1960s. Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970), a 1,500-foot coil of black basalt and earth extending into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, is the most famous example. Smithson was interested in entropy, the process by which ordered systems decay into disorder. The jetty was submerged by rising lake water in 1972 and did not reappear until 2002, when drought lowered the water level. Its disappearance and reappearance became part of the work, demonstrating how environmental art is subject to natural processes in ways that gallery art is not.
Other key Land Art works from this period include Michael Heizer's Double Negative (1969), two massive trenches cut into a mesa in the Nevada desert, and Walter De Maria's Lightning Field (1977), 400 stainless steel poles arranged in a grid in the high desert of New Mexico. These works were remote, monumental, and deliberately inaccessible to the gallery-going public.
While Land Art was dominated by male artists working in remote deserts, a parallel strand of environmental art emerged that was more intimate, more political, and more often practiced by women. Ana Mendieta's Silueta series (1973-1980) pressed her body into earth, mud, grass, and fire to create temporary imprints in the landscape, combining body art with environmental concerns. Agnes Denes planted a two-acre wheat field in 1982 on a landfill in Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street, in a work called Wheatfield: A Confrontation. The field yielded 1,000 pounds of wheat that was harvested and distributed, transforming a piece of prime real estate into a commentary on food production, land use, and economic priorities.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Maintenance Art (1973) proposed that the work of maintenance, including garbage collection and cleaning, should be recognized as art. She became the unofficial artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, creating works that addressed the environmental and social systems that sustain urban life. A 2024 paper in Nature-Based Solutions traced the lineage from Ukeles's work to contemporary "ecoartivism," noting that "ecoart surfaced in the mainstream art world in the late nineties as a developing genre" that is "acutely concerned with practical impacts, often proactively engaging with engineers, scientists and local communities." Read the paper at ScienceDirect.
By the late 2010s, environmental art had moved from the margins to the center of contemporary art programming. A 2024 Hyperallergic article traced what it called "the ecological turn" in art, noting that "in the seven years" since the 2018 exhibition Eco-Visionaries traveled across six European institutions, "there are few art institutions on the planet that did not put up a show on the subject." The article noted that in 2023, the first museum dedicated to the climate crisis, The Climate Museum, opened in New York. Read the article at Hyperallergic.
A 2025 book from Springer, Earth Matters: The Aesthetics and Politics of Soil, examined how soil has evolved in art "from an aesthetic medium to a carrier of political, ecological, and historical statements," noting that "artists today thematise ecological crises, colonial violence, land grabbing, plant blindness and the close relationship between humans and the earth." Read the publication at Springer.
Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake is the defining work of Land Art. Built from 6,650 tons of black basalt and earth, the jetty is subject to water level fluctuations that periodically submerge and expose it. Smithson wrote that he was interested in "the dialectic of the site and nonsite," the relationship between the remote location and the gallery documentation that represents it. He died in a plane crash in 1973 while surveying a site for another work, cutting short a career that had already redefined what art could be.
Denes's Wheatfield: A Confrontation (1982) planted two acres of wheat on a landfill in Battery Park City, Manhattan. The work took four months to complete, from planting to harvest, and yielded 1,000 pounds of wheat. Denes described it as "a symbol, a universal concept, a paradox, a contradiction: it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns."
Goldsworthy works with natural materials including leaves, stones, twigs, ice, and flowers, creating temporary sculptures in the landscape that are often destroyed by the elements shortly after completion. His works are documented through photography, which becomes the lasting record of an ephemeral act. Reconstructed Icicles (2019) and his ongoing series of cairns and stone walls demonstrate his principle of working with nature rather than imposing on it.
Eliasson's Ice Watch (2014, 2015, 2018) transported blocks of glacial ice from Greenland to public squares in Copenhagen, Paris, and London, where they were left to melt. The work provided what Eliasson called "a direct and tangible experience of the melting arctic ice." At Tate Modern in 2018, the ice blocks sat on the bank of the Thames, slowly disappearing as passersby touched them, photographed them, and watched them shrink.
Sara's 2025 Tate Modern Turbine Hall commission Goavve used reindeer hides, electrical cables, and LED lights to address the ecological crisis in Sápmi. Her work connects indigenous knowledge systems with global environmental concerns, arguing that "indigenous and Sámi knowledge systems and philosophy" should be recognized "not as something outmoded or ancient, but rather as opening the possibility of their great value as future thinking for all."
Their 2024 installation Artificial Green by Nature Green 4.0 at the Bangkok Art Biennale used a living palm oil tree, a mechanical drawing arm, and an erasure machine to create a cyclical process of image-making and destruction. The biofeedback data from the tree controlled the erasure process, making the plant a collaborator in the artwork. The work addressed deforestation from palm oil production in Indonesia, which was responsible for the loss of over two million hectares of forest between 2011 and 2016. Read the feature at Artforum.
Environmental art overlaps with Land Art (Earth Art), the movement from which it partially descended. It connects to sustainable art, which focuses specifically on art made with environmental responsibility in materials and process. It shares concerns with body art through artists like Ana Mendieta, who combined both practices. It relates to installation art in its use of space and environment, and to Arte Povera in its use of humble, natural materials. For broader context, read our blog post on Land Art and working with nature, or explore our guide to installation art.
Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty is visible at Rozel Point in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, when water levels are low enough. Check the Dia Art Foundation website for current visibility conditions. Andy Goldsworthy's permanent installations, including his stone houses at Storm King Art Center in New York, are accessible to the public. Olafur Eliasson's installations are regularly exhibited at major museums worldwide.
For contemporary environmental art, the 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025) featured Emeka Ogboh's The Way Earthly Things Are Going II, a sound installation using tree stump speakers and choral music to address deforestation. The Tate Modern's Turbine Hall commissions, including Máret Ánne Sara's 2025 work, regularly feature environmental art. For more on related movements, read our entries on Land Art and sustainable art, or explore our post on Land Art and working with nature.
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