Walter De Maria

Walter De Maria, born in 1933, American sculptor, who helped establish a form of art known as earthworks or land art, outdoor art on a vast scale that involves manipulation of the landscape itself. One of De Maria’s earliest earthworks was Mile-Long Drawing (1968), which consisted of two parallel chalk lines 3.7 m (12 ft) apart that extended for 3.2 km (2 mi) across the Mojave Desert in California. Like many earthworks, this piece had only a temporary physical presence; it exists primarily as an idea documented in photographs, drawings, and writings.

De Maria created the first of three Earth Room installations in 1968 at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Munich, Germany; this installation was one of his best-known works. One version, TheNew York Earth Room, 1977, is permanently installed in a second-floor loft of the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City. Visitors climb stairs to confront a Plexiglas barrier holding back a gallery full of dirt 56 cm (22 in) deep. They can look at but not walk over an expanse of rich loamy soil, moistened and picked clean of debris on a regular basis. De Maria’s project suggests access to the ground beneath the city’s concrete, a possibility for connection to the earth, which is denied to, and forgotten by, most city dwellers. There is no art object separate from the experience of viewing, and nothing to buy or sell, a circumstance that is typical of much conceptual art of the late 1960s and 1970s.

The Lightning Field (1977), perhaps De Maria’s most ambitious and provocative piece, consists of 400 stainless steel poles planted in a grid that is one mile by one kilometer wide. Located on a high desert plateau in southwestern New Mexico, the work was commissioned and is maintained by the Dia Center for the Arts. Visitors must make reservations in advance to visit the site and agree to spend a specified amount of time there, sleeping in a small cabin at the site. In the summer months lightning storms often approach, dancing spectacularly among the steel rods. Even when lightning is not in the area, the immensity of the landscape, beautifully framed by the pattern of the poles, inspires awe.

Born in Albany, California, De Maria studied at the University of California at Berkeley, completing a B.A. degree in history in 1957 and an M.A. degree in art in 1959. De Maria was instrumental in organizing early performance art, known as happenings, in the San Francisco Bay area in 1959 and 1960. In 1965 he moved to New York City and became a drummer with the rock band Velvet Underground. De Maria’s work was included in exhibitions of minimal art and conceptual art starting in the mid-1960s; his large-scale projects are considered icons of those movements.