Land Arts of the American West

In 2000 professor Bill Gilbert, initiated an “interdisciplinary field program” at the University if New Mexico. Land Arts of the American West soon became a collaboration with professor Chris Taylor from Texas Tech University. Each year students involved in this extended course embark on a fifty day-10,000 mile road trip, with the objective of “expanding the definition of art through direct experience with the full range of human interventions in the landscape, from pre-contact indigenous to contemporary.” The group visits sites such as the Wendover Complex, the Roden Crater (Turell), Grand Canyon, Double Negative (Heizer), Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Spiral Jetty (Smithson), Chinati Foundation in Marfa TX (Judd), Lightning Field (De Maria), Chaco Canyon and more. The semester is spent traveling and camping with guest scholars, whose expertise range from archeology to critical theory, design, sculpture, art history, and architecture. Students also respond and interact with their environment by making artistic gestures and leaving their own mark on the landscape.

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Chris Taylor is a Harvard-trained architect who teaches architecture at Texas Tech University. In conjunction with the Architecture Workers Combine, he explores the direct and interstitial forces creating landscape with built work in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Pennsylvania.

Bill Gilbert holds the Lannan Chair in Land Arts of the American West in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico. His art practice explores the dialogue between environment and cultures in the Southwest. He has exhibited his work in the United States, Ecuador, the Czech Republic, Canada, and Japan.