exploring relationships of land, art and community through exhibitions, site-specifi c art works, a speakers series,
performances, tours, excursions and a culminating book. Focusing on “environmental” or “land” art, the collaboration seeks to address our changing relationship to nature, and to offer a new or previously unconsidered understanding of the place in which we live. Historically, New Mexico has been a place where the intersection of nature and culture is at issue. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the American Southwest was the location of the fi rst generation of Land Art or Earthworks, including such major projects as Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, Charles Ross’ Star Axis in New Mexico, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in Utah, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona. Since then, the Land Art genre has been subsumed under the more general term “environmental art” which is a highly diverse and vital feature of contemporary art around the world. This new genre recognizes that what we now think of as the “environment” has broadened to include the global community, the microscopic world and cyberspace as well as wilderness, the urban environment and suburban sprawl. It includes ecological activism, reclamation and remediation projects, ephemeral site-specifi c performances and many other approaches, all of which have in common art and artists that respond to features of our natural environment. LAND/ART involves over 25 presenting organizations in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Mountainair, New Mexico, and is coordinated by 516 ARTS. Participating organizations include the Albuquerque Museum, UNM Art Museum, THE LAND/an art site, the Center for Contemporary Arts, the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, SITE Santa Fe and many others. All LAND/ART programs are listed on the project web site www.landartnm.org, and will be included in the complete program guide which will be available in May 2009. The culminating LAND/ART book will be published by Radius Books (http://radiusbooks.org), and will be available in December 2009.