A new groundbreaking exhibition at Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Centre entitled ‘Groundswell: Women of Land Art’ on now until the 7th of January 2024, for the first time is dedicated solely to the works of women who create so-called ‘Land art’, a genre that has been previously dominated by male artists until now. Land art, also known as Earth art, emerged in the 1960s as a new trend in art based on the use of landscape and the environment for both materials and location, utilizing nature rather than representing it and usually on a monumental sized scale. The first practitioners of Land art were Americans and, with exception of one Nancy Holt, were all men.
This latest exhibition of Land art is endeavoring to dispel this image of a male only genre of art in that for the first time it will only be exhibiting the works of female artists, taking a retrospective view of previous notable works created by women and as well as works of contemporary artists. Installations are both indoors and outdoors, the outside open spaces a necessity to accommodate works of such large scale. Among the exhibitors past and present are Lita Albuquerque, Beverly Buchanan, Agnes Denes, Marin Hassinger, Patricia Johanson, Ana Mendieta, Jody Pinto, Meg Webster, and Nancy Holt, the latter being the main inspiration of the show and some of her most famous works are posthumously recreated, including Pipeline which is a reworking of a smaller version of her 1980’s oeuvre in Anchorage, Alaska, in which a large steel pipe winds its way around the museum grounds and into the galleries where a section is leaking oil onto a white floor; the original of this version was inspired by her seeing the way the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline invaded the natural landscape in 1986 and her imaging leaks occurring into this pristine natural environment – as she put it “more frequently than most people realize, breakdowns occur and pipes crack or rust out, oil spills”.
This exhibition feminises the narrative of Land art and emphasizes that the men who previously have dominated this genre do not define it. Even so, by observing the products of Land art from these women artists there appears to be no definite distinction, artistically speaking and in terms of quality of the product, between their work and that of their male counterparts. Therefore, what the exhibition emphatically does tell us is that it is all about the art not the gender of the person producing it, but equally it is saying ‘women are as good as men at this’.
It is particularly impressive that women have become equal to men in this movement since by virtue of their gender they have been disadvantaged by not having the backing nor the funding to produce the large scale Land art, which is very expensive to make, some having cost millions of dollars to install (by a man!). Women’s Land art has also for this reason been small scale and so ephemeral in duration but with this latest exhibition a long lasting legacy has surely begun, and women have emerged from under the cloaks of men.
Helpfully if you cannot attend the exhibition in person, you get a good view of it from the fully illustrated catalogue (available on Amazon at £48) entitled Groundswell: Women of Land Art composed by Dr. Leigh Arnold, the woman who curated the exhibition and who is the Associate Curator of the Nasher Sculpture Park.
December 2023 | Issue 1
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