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New UMFA Series Explores Land Art, Landscape, and the Environment

Salt Lake City – The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) at the University of Utah is launching a new series of talks, films, meet-ups, and more that explore our complex relationship with the world around us. ARTLandish: Land Art, Landscape, and the Environment kicks off this month with two free public events.

UMFAOn Tuesday, February 9, at 7 pm, the University’s Department of Art and Art History, in partnership with the ARTLandish series, hosts a lecture by Mark Brest van Kempen, the 2016 Marva and John Warnock Artist in Residence. Brest van Kempen will discuss the influence of Land art in his work, which uses the landscape itself as sculptural material—from his Free Speech Monument on the University of California-Berkeley campus to Land Exchange at the National Academy of Art in China.

On Thursday, February 25, at 7 pm, the UMFA hosts “Land Art on Film,” a one-night-only screening of eight film and video artworks that capture artist interventions in the landscape. Visual documentation was imperative for the Land artists working in remote locations in the 1960s and 70s, providing artists with their only means of sharing fleeting performances and ephemeral works in the landscape.

Both events will be held in the Gould Auditorium at the University’s J. Willard Marriott Library.

Featured films are Lawrence Weiner’s BEACHED (1970), Vito Acconci’s Digging Piece (1970), Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s Swamp (1971), Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1978), Charles Atlas’s From An Island Summer (1983–84), Joan Jonas’s Brooklyn Bridge (1988), Francis Alÿs’s Paradox of Praxis I (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) (1997), and Carrie Schneider’s Burning House (2012–2013).

The ARTLandish series is sponsored by the S. J. and Jessie E. Quinney Foundation and presented in partnership with the University’s College of Fine Arts and Marriott Library and the Salt Lake City Public Library.

Upcoming events in the series include a 7 pm, March 24, presentation by contemporary Utah artists working in the landscape and an April 30 Sun Tunnels Community Meet-up at the site of this iconic Land art site in Utah’s west desert. For details, please visit umfa.utah.edu/artlandish