Land Art uses earth, stone, and natural materials to make art in the landscape itself. From Smithson's Spiral Jetty to Goldsworthy's ephemeral works, learn how it reshaped sculpture.
In April 1970, Robert Smithson hired a bulldozer and pushed 6,650 tons of black basalt rock and earth into the red water of Great Salt Lake in Utah. The result was Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot-long coil that extends from the shore into the lake. The water level fluctuates, and the jetty has been submerged for years at a time, then re-emerges encrusted with salt crystals. Smithson chose the site partly because the water was red from bacteria and algae, giving the impression of blood flowing through a spiral. He died in a plane crash in 1973 while surveying another earthwork site in Texas, three years after completing the jetty. He was 35. The work remains there today, owned by the Dia Art Foundation, visible when the lake level drops below 4,197 feet.
Land Art, also called Earth Art, is a movement in which artists use the landscape itself as their medium and canvas. Instead of bringing materials into a gallery, they work with dirt, rocks, water, vegetation, and other natural elements at remote outdoor sites. The movement emerged in the late 1960s in the United States and Britain as a rejection of the commercial gallery system and the commodification of art. Land artists made works that could not be bought, sold, or easily visited. Some pieces are monumental and permanent, while others are ephemeral, lasting only hours or days before nature reclaims them.
This entry covers what Land Art is, how it emerged from Minimalism and Conceptual Art, which artists defined it, and how a movement that rejected the gallery has become one of the most influential forces in contemporary environmental art.
Land Art is art made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself or making structures in the landscape using natural materials found on site. The work is often site-specific, meaning it is created for a particular location and cannot be moved or recreated elsewhere without losing its meaning. The materials are the earth itself: soil, sand, rocks, water, branches, leaves, ice, and snow. Some artists modify the land on a massive scale with heavy machinery, while others make delicate, temporary arrangements that a passing hiker might not notice.
The movement rejected the gallery system on principle. In the 1960s, the art world was centered on commercial galleries in New York, and many artists felt that art had become a commodity to be bought and sold like any other product. By making work in remote deserts, mountains, and shorelines, Land artists created art that could not be collected, displayed, or traded. The only way to experience the work was to travel to it, and even then, it might be submerged, eroded, or gone.
The Guggenheim Bilbao mounted a major exhibition in early 2026 called Arts of the Earth, curated by Manuel Cirauqui, which surveyed more than six decades of soil-based art with over 100 pieces by nearly 50 artists. The exhibition built a narrative of wellness and sustainability, positioning health and ecological repair as communal, ongoing processes. Every piece was transported by boat or train to avoid carbon-intensive flights, and works were reconstructed using local materials, including mud from the Nervion River just outside the museum. Read more at Berlin Art Link.
Land Art emerged in the late 1960s in the United States, growing out of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Minimalism had reduced sculpture to basic geometric forms and industrial materials, and Conceptual Art had shifted the focus from the physical object to the idea behind it. Land Art took both tendencies to their logical conclusion: the object was the land itself, and the idea was more important than the viewer's ability to see the work in person.
The movement was also a response to the social and political climate of the late 1960s. The Vietnam War, the environmental movement, and a growing disillusionment with urban industrial society all contributed to a desire among artists to escape the gallery and engage with the natural world. The first Earth Day was held in April 1970, the same month Smithson built Spiral Jetty. The coincidence is not accidental: Land Art was part of a broader cultural shift toward environmental consciousness.
Smithson's essay "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," published in Artforum in 1968, is the foundational theoretical text of the movement. Smithson argued that museums and galleries were "closed systems" that detached art from the real world, and that artists should work with entropy, geology, and the natural processes of decay and erosion rather than against them. The essay was followed by the "Earthworks" exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in New York in October 1968, which brought together works by Smithson, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Morris, and others. The exhibition was the first time the term "earthworks" was used publicly to describe this new approach.
Smithson was the intellectual leader of Land Art and its most influential theorist. Spiral Jetty (1970, Great Salt Lake, Utah) is his masterpiece and the most famous Land Art work in existence. The jetty is a 15-foot-wide coil that makes one and a half counterclockwise turns from the shore into the lake. Smithson also made Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971, Emmen, Netherlands) for the Sonsbeek outdoor exhibition, and wrote extensively on entropy, geology, and the relationship between art and the natural world. His death in 1973 cut short a career that had already redefined what sculpture could be.
Goldsworthy represents the other side of Land Art: ephemeral, intimate, and made by hand rather than by machine. Working primarily in rural Scotland, he creates temporary sculptures from leaves, stones, ice, snow, twigs, and thorns. His Rain Shadows series involves lying on the ground during rain and then photographing the dry silhouette left behind. His permanent works include Spire (2008) and Wood Line (2011) in the San Francisco Presidio. The National Galleries of Scotland mounted a major retrospective, Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh from July 26 to November 2, 2025, featuring over 200 works from his earliest experiments in the mid-1970s to pieces conceived for the show. The exhibition transformed the RSA building into a site-specific installation with cracked clay walls, windfallen oak branches forming a 20-meter corridor called Oak Passage, and 10,000 reeds appearing to pour from a skylight. Read more at The Guardian.
De Maria created The Lightning Field (1977, Quemado, New Mexico), which consists of 400 polished stainless steel poles arranged in a grid measuring one mile by one kilometer in the high desert. The poles are designed to attract lightning during the summer monsoon season, though lightning strikes are rare and the work is equally striking in clear weather, when the poles catch and reflect the changing light. The Dia Art Foundation maintains the site and allows six visitors per day to stay overnight in a cabin on the property.
Heizer has spent five decades building City (1972-present, Garden Valley, Nevada), a massive complex of earth, concrete, and geometric forms spread over one and a half miles in the Nevada desert. The work was inspired by ancient Mesoamerican architecture and is one of the largest sculptures ever attempted. It was opened to the public in 2022 by the Triple Aught Foundation, which has spent decades raising funds and fighting off proposed nuclear waste storage facilities and military installations near the site. Heizer's earlier Double Negative (1969), two massive trenches cut into the facing sides of a mesa in the Mormon Mesa, Nevada, remains one of the defining works of the movement.
Holt created Sun Tunnels (1976, Great Basin Desert, Utah), four large concrete cylinders arranged in an open X pattern. The tunnels are aligned with the rising and setting sun on the summer and winter solstices, and each tunnel has holes drilled in the top that correspond to the stars in four constellations. Holt's work has often been overshadowed by her husband Smithson's, but her contribution to Land Art is increasingly recognized. The Dia Art Foundation acquired Sun Tunnels in 2018 and has since undertaken conservation work to preserve the site.
Land Art's first phase runs from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, centered in the American West. This is the period of the monumental earthworks: Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Heizer's Double Negative and City, De Maria's The Lightning Field, and Morris's Observatory (1971, Lelystad, Netherlands). These works were made with heavy machinery, required significant funding, and were located in remote, difficult-to-reach sites. The artists documented them through photography, film, and writing, which became the primary way most people experienced the work.
The second phase, beginning in the late 1970s and continuing to the present, is more diverse and international. Goldsworthy in Britain, Richard Long in Britain, and Hamish Fulton in Britain developed a gentler, more ephemeral approach. Long's A Line Made by Walking (1967) is a photograph of a path in a grassy field created by the artist repeatedly walking back and forth in a straight line. This approach does not require heavy machinery or remote sites, and it emphasizes the artist's physical engagement with the land rather than the transformation of the land itself.
In 2026, Goldsworthy's Red Flags (2020) is on view at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco through July 30. The work features 50 flags, each stained red with earth collected from one of the 50 U.S. states, displayed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The flags range in color from pale ochre to deep sienna, pointing to geographic diversity while insisting on a shared connection to the land. Read more at FOR-SITE.
Land Art's influence extends into environmental art, ecological art, and the broader sustainability movement. Contemporary artists like Delcy Morelos, who created the earthen mound installation Witch (Sorgin) for the Guggenheim Bilbao's 2026 Arts of the Earth exhibition, continue to use soil as a medium for exploring humanity's relationship with the planet. The movement's insistence on site-specificity influenced the development of installation art and public art more broadly. The idea that art should engage with its environment rather than sit in a neutral white gallery space is now standard practice in contemporary sculpture.
Land Art overlaps with assemblage in its use of found materials, though Land Art works at a vastly larger scale and uses materials found on site rather than brought into a gallery. It is related to Constructivism in its interest in industrial materials and engineering, though Land artists rejected Constructivism's utopian belief in technology. The ephemeral works of Goldsworthy and Long connect to action painting in their emphasis on process and the physical act of making. For more on the broader context, read our post on art and the environment.
The most accessible major Land Art site is Smithson's Spiral Jetty at Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake in Utah, which is visible when the lake level is low enough. Dia Art Foundation maintains The Lightning Field in New Mexico, where advance reservations are required and only six visitors per day are accommodated. Heizer's City in Nevada is open by reservation through the Triple Aught Foundation. Goldsworthy's permanent works in San Francisco's Presidio, including Spire and Wood Line, are freely accessible to the public.
If you want to trace Land Art from its monumental origins to its contemporary forms, start at Spiral Jetty in Utah, then visit The Lightning Field in New Mexico, and end at Goldsworthy's Presidio works in San Francisco. You will see how a movement that began with bulldozers in the desert evolved into a practice that treats the land as a collaborator rather than a raw material. For more on the broader context, read our entries on assemblage and Constructivism, or explore our post on art and the environment.
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