Exploring Land Art at LA MoCA

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In class this spring, our Art Adventures students were inspired by the land artist Maya Lin to create their very own miniature land art sculptures.  We learned about line, scale, and the ephemeral nature of most land art.

Therefore, we were excited to learn about the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ exhibition, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974.  According to LA MoCA’s website, the exhibit “is the first large-scale, historical-thematic exhibition to deal broadly with Land art, capturing the simultaneous impulse emergent in the 1960s to use the earth as an artistic medium and to locate works in remote sites far from familiar art contexts.”  It includes 250 works by more than 80 artists from around the world and serves as a comprehensive overview of the formation of the concept of land art.  Much of the work shown in the exhibition is video or photography of the original land art pieces, and the show asserts that photography, video, and television are integral parts of land art and not simply a way to document an temporary art piece.  This is certainly in keeping with the practice of many contemporary land artists such as Andrew Rogers whose work is being documented by satellite by Google Earth Tour.  It is exciting to see a museum tackle the history and influence of land art, and we wish we could go.

This looks like an amazing exhibition so if you’re in LA this summer, check it out!

Not headed to LA?  MoCA’s website has a really cool interactive map that pinpoints the locations of key artwork from the exhibit and demonstrates their relationship to that location: http://www.moca.org/landart/

Check out our students land art sculptures on our Flickr Page!

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