T List: Women Land Artists Get Their Due in Dallas

The stars of land art, the conceptual art movement that rose to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s, have mostly been men. Think of Robert Smithson, who created “Spiral Jetty” (1970), a 1,500-foot-long coil of basalt rock and earth in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, or Michael Heizer, whose “Double Negative” (1969) is composed of two trenches dug out of the Nevada desert. A new exhibit at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas shifts the focus to the women at the center of the movement: “Groundswell: Women of Land Art” opens next week, highlighting the work of 12 female artists. Among the pieces on view will be the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s “Silueta” series (1973-80), which combines body, performance and landscape in film and photographs of the American sculptor Beverly Buchanan’s “Marsh Ruins” (1981), three rocklike pieces made of concrete and tabby — a combination of oyster shells, sand and water — in Brunswick, Ga. The exhibition’s curator, Leigh Arnold, notes that this group took a “subtler and more poetic” approach than their male counterparts, “expressing their desire to collaborate with nature rather than dominate it.” Take Agnes Denes’s “Wheatfield — A Confrontation,” a two-acre meadow that was planted in a former landfill near Manhattan’s World Trade Center in the spring of 1982 and harvested four months later. As Denes wrote, “It called attention to our misplaced priorities.” In addition to debuting new work by the pioneering public artist Mary Miss and the visual artist Lita Albuquerque, the show will include works reimagined for the Nasher, such as Nancy Holt’s “Pipeline” (1986), a structure of steel piping that Holt created in response to the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. “Groundswell: Women of Land Art” will be on view from Sept. 23 through Jan. 7, 2024, nashersculpturecenter.org.