Earthworks by Women in Cities Have Been Less Visible Than Heizers and Smithsons in Remote Locales. That’s Changing.

09/09/2024
Art in America
By Kirsten Swenson

Mary Miss’s Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1989–1996), commissioned in the late ’80s by the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, merges sculpture, study space, and landscape design within a wetland ecosystem. Arced boardwalks lead visitors over the surface of a pond, descending to meet the water—one leads to a sunken seating area for a close encounter with lily pads, frogs, and dragonflies. Pilings frame a section of the shoreline as a sculptural space. On land, an earthen mound echoes the curve of the shoreline and an open pavilion offers shelter.

“I really wanted people in Iowa, where repeated floods have been so damaging over the years, to see a wetland up close and to begin to understand how it functions,” Miss said recently in reference to a work she describes as “a demonstration wetland.” Created during a yearslong collaboration between Miss, the Art Center, scientists, and community groups, Greenwood Pond marked a turning point in Miss’s career when she realized that collaboration of the kind made it more possible to approach complex problems like climate change and humans’ relationship to the environment.

But the Des Moines Art Center has not maintained the work’s wooden structures, including the boardwalks and pavilion, and in October the site was closed to the public over safety concerns. Citing repair costs of $2.6 million, the museum’s board voted in March to demolish Greenwood Pond: Double Site, and director Kelly Baum signed a demolition order. In early April, Miss sued the Art Center, and in May, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction concluding that “neither side is entitled to what it wants.” The Art Center cannot demolish Greenwood Pond, but neither can Miss “force the Art Center to repair or restore the artwork to its original condition.” The result, the judge conceded, is “an unsatisfying status quo” in which the work will remain standing but in disrepair.

Miss belongs to a generation of women who, starting in the 1970s, set out to rethink Land art as an environmentally minded public art form, often sited in cities. They reimagined public space in ambitious, visionary projects that collapsed categories of earthworks, parks, and landscape design to engage natural and human histories—and possible futures. Our shared relationship to the environment “is a very hard story to tell,” Miss told me, but she and other artists found it necessary. “We’re willing to take on these complicated issues,” she said of fellow artists including Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Nancy Holt. “These are not simple things that we’re dealing with. The complexity of environmental issues is absolutely what our life is about these days—how to find a path forward.”

Complication carries over in other ways in ambitious projects that often take years to pull off and require enormous investment and risk, particularly public projects involving many stakeholders. “Public art is treacherous,” Ukeles told me, adding that she was echoing words she recalled Miss saying to her once. Funding fluctuates, problems arise, priorities shift. Some sites are finished, while others will never be complete. More than a few have been in progress in one way or another for decades. Even celebrated projects that have been fully realized can’t be taken for granted.

Greenwood Pond: Double Site is currently closed to visitors and its future is unknown, but one of Miss’s most important landscapes is easily accessible in Lower Manhattan. South Cove (1984–1987) is a 3.5-acre park along the Hudson River in Battery Park City designed by Miss in collaboration with Susan Childs and Stanton Eckstut on then-new waterfront made from earth excavated during the construction of the World Trade Center. Miss has lived nearby, in Tribeca, since the late 1960s and was frustrated that she couldn’t access the water. Her proposal for South Cove emphasized the site as the “physical edge” of Manhattan, a meeting point between the city and the brackish water at the point where the Hudson River meets the Atlantic Ocean. “The built and ‘natural’ landscapes are laid out for examination, consideration, and potential redefinition of their relationships,” Miss wrote in 2004.

Visitors to South Cove walk along a boardwalk—a seam of craggy rocks and meadow grasses on one side, the river and a grid of pilings on the other. The pilings reference the remains of piers that can still be seen on Manhattan’s West Side, a remnant of the island’s industrial history. Miss placed pilings at South Cove by design, “stitching together the land and the water.” Gulls and cormorants were fishing from the pilings on a visit in May—it’s easy to forget that Manhattan is part of a saltwater ecosystem, but not at South Cove. A curved jetty leads visitors over the water. As Miss explained, “South Cove was very much about trying to bring people into contact with water and their experience of being there and being able to interact with the water–hearing it, or smelling it, or getting their feet wet.” At high tide, water splashes onto the jetty. An elevated structure offers another perspective, situating the site in New York Harbor with views of the Statue of Liberty, New Jersey, and Staten Island.

Ukeles has been engaging another site not too far away—Freshkills Landfill on Staten Island—since the late 1970s, when she became the artist-in-residence of New York City’s Department of Sanitation. The 2,200-acre area—which she calls “mind-bendingly problematic”—was the world’s largest municipal landfill before its closure in 2000. Ukeles’s sculptural environment LANDING (in progress) was first initiated by a Percent for Art project, a joint commission of the Departments of Sanitation and Cultural Affairs that dates to 1989. When completed, if the designs for it hold, the work will have three elements. CANTILEVERED OVERLOOK will be a 62-foot viewing platform accessible from two elevated walkways. The steel, concrete, and glass structure will elevate visitors above a tidal inlet and offer views of a two-mile long landfill mound and an ever-changing tidal wetland ecosystem. Visitors to LANDING “enter the intersection of two contradictory landscapes,” in Ukeles words: the natural systems flourishing in the tidal inlet and the “engineered, formerly degraded landscape” of the landfill mounds. EARTH BENCH and EARTH TRIANGLE are earthen mounds that will provide a “safe, solid refuge,” a place to pause or picnic. Ukeles intends LANDING as a place to “land” and reflect on this complex landscape, including its history and the possibilities for Earth’s future.

Ukeles declined to give a date for the completion of LANDING, but her landfill earthwork Turnaround/Surround (1989–ongoing), designed by Ukeles in collaboration with landscape architect John Kisseda, has been a fixture in Cambridge, Massachusetts for two decades. It is located inside 50-acre Danehy Park, and one can walk there from Alewife Station, the terminus of Boston’s Red Line subway. I usually arrive by car—Turnaround/Surround is tucked away behind a strip mall, and a visit to the earthwork can be combined with a trip to Whole Foods or PetSmart (dogs love it too!). Proximity to commerce is part of the experience, as will be the case for LANDING—Ukeles points out that the latter work’s location is close to the Staten Island Mall, home to a cycle of consumerism and waste production.

Turnaround/Surround occupies the site of a Cambridge landfill that was active from the 1950s to the 1970s. As you walk through Danehy Park, there are meadows and playing fields but no signs that you’re entering an artwork. This is as Ukeles intended—Turnaround/Surround is meant to be continuous with the larger environment. But the topography of a flat-topped landfill mound is hard to miss. “Glassphalt” pathways designed by Ukeles meander along the sides of the mound to the top. The asphalt sparkles with colorful crushed recycled glass. The paths are bordered by fragrant flowers that Ukeles calls “smellers.” These were inspired by a woman who grew up in the subsidized housing towers that border one side of the park. “My whole childhood stank!” the woman told Ukeles, in reference to growing up next to an active landfill. The paths now smell of lavender and roses in summer.

Visitors who ascend the landfill mound can enjoy views of Cambridge and Boston while seated on large cast-aluminum semicircular “thrones” made from recycled cans. (The close observer will notice Ukeles’s signature on the back of a throne.) There is also a dance floor with a rendering of the Milky Way. Ukeles has transformed the landfill into a destination that feels special, even celebratory, where visitors can take in the city and the natural environment, including a restored wetlands at the landfill base that was part of her plan. Turnaround/Surround is intended as a place for collective, communal experience—after all, as Ukeles points out, a landfill is a “social sculpture,” made from the “contributions” of every citizen.

Nancy Holt’s landfill earthwork Sky Mound (1984­–) was commissioned by the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission, an agency formed to manage the numerous landfills sited in eastern New Jersey’s wetlands. For Holt, the 57-acre site of the largest landfill was a transcendent locale: “When you walk to the top of the landfill, you can see all of Manhattan. You can see the sky. You can see, maybe 20 miles in every direction. And you are totally conscious of the sky, the same way as you would be out west,” Holt told an interviewer in 1993.

Holt’s design included a pond for migrating birds, sculptural landscaping aligned to the solstices, star-viewing mounds, a sphere encircled by a moat that would reflect the moon, methane flares around the site that transformed landfill’s off-gassing into a design element, and wind turbines. Holt anticipated that Sky Mound would be visible to travelers by airplane, car, and train, as well as a park for human and non-human visitors. She worked on the site for more than a decade, calling it her magnum opus, but the project was suspended, likely due to civil engineering challenges related to the actively settling landfill. Today, the site of Sky Mound can be glimpsed from the New Jersey Turnpike—the mound is now a solar farm, which at least aligns with Holt’s desire to model sustainability and closer connections to the cosmos.

Holt’s commission for Sky Mound was preceded by her successful completion of Dark Star Park (1979-1984) in Arlington, Virginia—another project that invites awareness of the cosmos. In 1979, Holt accepted a commission to design a park near the newly opened Rosslyn Station–the first Metro stop across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. As a letter from the National Endowment for the Arts noted, this was a unique commission “which permits the artist to design the entire environment for the work of art.” Holt had completed her iconic Sun Tunnels in the Utah desert three years earlier. With Dark Star Park she was continuing “concerns with the architectural form of the tunnel and its various symbolic ramifications–birth, death, transitions, etc.”

A tunnel creates a sheltering entry to the park, located at a hectic commuter crossroads. Fast-moving cars and airplanes coming and going from nearby Reagan International Airport can overwhelm. But elements of the park slow time. Carefully situated spheres, reflecting pools, tunnels, and mounds engage the visitor’s perception: as Holt wrote in a guide to the park, “spheres of different sizes may appear to be the same size, or one sphere may eclipse another in passing, or a sphere may be seen through a round hole in another sphere, through a tunnel, or reflected in a pool.” The tunnels of Sun Tunnels are aligned with the solstices, but at Dark Star Park the cosmic element is more mundane: “The shadows cast by the spheres and the poles will line up with the shadow patterns on the ground at 9:32 AM each year on August 1, the day William Henry Ross acquired the land that became Rosslyn,” Holt explained, referencing a 19th-century landowner whose name now refers to the neighborhood.

Miss, Ukeles, and Holt are just a few among other artists of their generation—see also Patricia Johanson, Elyn Zimmerman, Betty Buchanan, and Alice Aycock—whose earthworks, structures, and environments engage the American landscape. Though their projects are urban and accessible, these women remain less visible than Land artists like Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer who worked in remote desert locales. Their work is groundbreaking and, for many, just a subway ride away. It deserves a place on the itinerary—and in art history.