Earth Works Art Project

Student project: spectrum of colored stones

My husband and I visiting Spiral Jetty, 2015

There's something about Earthworks (aka Land Art) that make my heart sing!  After spending so much time teaching Pop Art, which is so much about consumerism and mass production, it was nice to take a week and ask the question: Is it a good idea? Does endless consumption make us happier?  It is not a coincidence that the year Robert Smithson created Spiral Jetty on Salt Lake (1970) is also the first year that Earth Day was celebrated. The Cuyahoga River caught on fire in 1969. No joke! This prompted a lot of activism that led to the Clean Air Act of 1970 and Clean Water Act of 1972. A couple weeks ago marked 40 years of the partial meltdown of Nuclear Plant Three Mile Island, which was close to my childhood home. So there's a lot to be said about people, including artists, being connected to the natural world.

I showed my class the "Rivers and Tides" a documentary on the work of Andy Goldsworthy. It's a beautiful film (that required a lot of audio description on my part for my students who are blind), but it is also packed with life lessons about noticing things, working intuitively, embracing impermanence, and not losing your cool when everything falls apart.  As a class, we strolled the campus looking for dandelions, purple leaves, and subtle rock colors before arranging them in places that might surprise someone passing by.

Student project: meandering purple leaf river