Land Art is an art movement that emerged in the late 1960s using the landscape itself as both site and material — earthworks beyond the gallery.
Land Art (also called Earth Art or Earthworks) emerged in the late 1960s in the American West as a deliberate rejection of the gallery system, the art market, and the white cube. Artists used the landscape itself as both site and material, often working at scales impossible inside any building. Robert Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' (1970), a 460-metre spiral of black basalt and earth coiling into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, is the movement's defining work; it has been variously visible, submerged, and crusted in salt over five decades. Michael Heizer's 'Double Negative' (1969–1970) is a 240,000-ton displacement of rhyolite and sandstone in the Nevada desert; his 'City' (begun 1972, completed 2022) is a kilometre-and-a-half-long architectural work in remote Garden Valley, Nevada. Walter De Maria's 'Lightning Field' (1977) in New Mexico is a grid of 400 stainless-steel poles arranged across a kilometre. Nancy Holt, Andy Goldsworthy, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude have extended the tradition. Land Art forces the viewer to travel, to find the work, and to become part of its landscape — an entirely different model of what art-making can be.