Best Land Art
Spiral Jetty is a work of land art created by American artist Robert Smithson in 1970 on the northeastern shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake. Built from basalt rock, earth, salt crystals, and water, it forms a large counterclockwise coil extending from the shoreline. Its appearance changes as lake leve...
Roden Crater is an ongoing art project by American artist James Turrell, situated inside an extinct volcanic cinder cone in Arizona's Painted Desert. Acquired by Turrell in 1977, the site has been carefully modified with tunnels, chambers, and viewing spaces designed to observe celestial phenomena a...
"The Lightning Field" is a land art installation by American sculptor Walter De Maria, completed in 1977 in the high desert of western New Mexico. The work consists of 400 polished stainless steel poles arranged in a rectangular grid measuring one mile by one kilometer. The poles, each approximately...
Desert Breath is a land art installation located in the Eastern Sahara desert near El Gouna, Egypt, completed in March 1997 by the artist collective D.A.ST. Arteam (Danae Stratou, Alexandra Stratou, and Stella Konstantinidis). The work covers approximately 100,000 square meters and consists of a dou...
Wrapped Reichstag was a temporary environmental artwork by Christo and Jeanne-Claude realized in Berlin in June 1995. The artists covered the Reichstag building, then the meeting place of the German parliament, with 100,000 square meters of silvery fabric and blue rope. The installation remained on...
Double Negative is a land artwork created by Michael Heizer in 1969 on Mormon Mesa near Overton, Nevada. It consists of two large trenches cut into opposite edges of a natural canyon, so the absent rock and the intervening void form essential parts of the work. Approximately 244,000 tons of sandston...
Star Axis is a large earthwork and naked-eye astronomical observatory created by American artist Charles Ross in the New Mexico desert. Begun in 1976, its chambers, tunnels, and stairways are organized around alignments with celestial events and the changing position of Earth's rotational axis relat...
Sun Tunnels is a large-scale land art installation completed in 1976 by American artist Nancy Holt. Located in Utah's Great Basin Desert, the artwork consists of four massive concrete cylinders arranged in an open configuration. The tunnels are precisely aligned with the rising and setting sun on th...
Broken Circle and Spiral Hill is a 1971 earthwork by American artist Robert Smithson, located in a sand quarry near Emmen in the Netherlands. It consists of two adjacent forms: a semicircular jetty enclosing a boulder in a body of water ('Broken Circle') and a conical mound carved with a spiral path...
Running Fence was a large-scale environmental artwork created by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude in September 1976. The temporary installation consisted of 24.5 miles of white woven nylon fabric suspended by steel cables and poles, traversing the landscape of Sonoma and Marin counties in Californi...
Surrounded Islands was a large-scale environmental artwork created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1983. The installation involved encircling 11 islands in Biscayne Bay near Miami, Florida, with approximately 6.5 million square feet of floating pink woven polypropylene fabric. The project required e...
City is a massive land art sculpture located in Garden Valley, Nevada, created by American artist Michael Heizer. Construction of the earthwork began in 1972, and it was opened to the public in 2022 after five decades of ongoing development. The monumental project consists of complex arrangements of...
Amarillo Ramp is a large-scale earthwork and land art installation created by American artist Robert Smithson. Situated in an active quarry near Amarillo, Texas, the piece consists of a spiral ramp constructed from earth and basalt rocks that extends into a pond. It serves as Smithson's final projec...
"Observatory" is a monumental land art installation created by American sculptor Robert Morris, located in the Flevoland province of the Netherlands. Completed in 1977, the earthwork consists of concentric circles of earth, timber, and stone, drawing functional and visual comparisons to ancient stru...
The Umbrellas was a temporary environmental artwork created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, installed simultaneously in Japan and California from October 9 to November 27, 1991. The project consisted of 3,100 umbrellas—1,340 blue ones in Japan's Ibaraki Prefecture and 1,760 yellow ones in California's...
