Behind the earth movers: the adventurous support of dealer Virginia Dwan allowed earthwork artists Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson and others to realize their pioneering projects - Patronage - Biography

Suzaan Boettger

We did an enormous poster for [Michael Heizer's] Double Negative [1969]. I think it must be about 48 or 50 inches, which was in keeping with the mammoth endeavor of this work. It wasn't just giganticism for its own sake; it really did relate to the work and get it across. So that communicated to people everywhere--collectors all over the country and in Europe were receiving this enormous poster. Primarily what we had were just photographs for the exhibition, but the intention was to communicate that the real exhibition was in Nevada. All right, it was under the auspices of the Dwan Gallery; Dwan Gallery's main facility was in New York, but we also had this space out there which was a work of art, and if you really wanted to see the show, you should be out there. And t/tat was revolutionary, to my knowledge.

--Virginia Dwan, interviewed by Charles Stuckey, May 1984 (1)

All right, in the American art world of the late 1960s, size did matter. In 1969, Michael Heizer initiated his eventual displacement of 240,000 tons of earth and rock into a ravine to make the facing notches of his Double Negative, thus extending the Dwan Gallery 2,500 miles west. Coincident with Heizer's January 1970 show documenting that work, Peter Hutchinson placed 450 pounds of wetted generic white bread along the rim of a Mexican volcano, covered it with 300 feet of plastic sheeting and grew a corona of lurid mold (Paricutin Volcano Project). A little over a year earlier, Robert Morris's Earthwork, an unruly 1,200-pound, 6-foot-diameter mound of earth, peat, remnant metal pieces, felt, grease and brick had dominated the October 1968 exhibition "Earth Works" at the Dwan Gallery in New York. In 1970, Robert Smithson moved 6,650 tons of earth from hillside to lake bed to make his 1,500-foot-long dirt roadway Spiral Jetty. These works used scale to create experiential environments.

Such massive undertakings were very much in keeping with the spirit of optimistic expansiveness that characterized U.S. aspirations of the time. In his 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy had spoken of the "New Frontier" on which the country stood poised and proposed a program that by the end of the decade would send astronauts to the moon and back. The postwar baby boom was in full swing and the economy buoyant. One product of this prosperity was the National Endowment for the Arts, whose Art in Public Places program played an important role in pumping up the scale of sculpture.

The size of earthworks also reflects the fact that the first phase of earth art was a "guy thing." That is, the earthen works and environments represented in that debut "Earth Works" exhibition were solely by men, 10 of them: Carl Andre, Herbert Bayer, Walter De Maria, Heizer, Stephen Kaltenbach, Sol LeWitt, Morris, Claes Oldenburg Dennis Oppenheim and Smithson. Several of the works displayed or represented in that show, as well as other large earthen excavations and mounds produced subsequently, were located in the deserts and mountains of the western U.S. While the dominance (if not the exclusivity) of male artists working in this new genre was consistent with art-world norms of the period, the particular kind of physical activities involved in moving those masses of earth in wilderness terrains also required the strength, muscularity and stamina traditionally associated with masculine power.

Yet the bold sculpture made by these artists did not result from their efforts alone. Although it is rarely acknowledged in discussion of this work, behind the hiring of earth-moving equipment and workers, at the forefront of the earthworks genre, was dealer Virginia Dwan, whose adventurous patronage and widespread promotion were key to its development.

Consider the sequence of advertisements heralding the October 1968 group show "Earth Works" at the Dwan Gallery. In the September 1968 issue of Artforum, a half-page black-and-white photograph showed a close-up of the deep imprint of rugged tire treads on a soggy dirt road. The advertisement's sole text, in small type below the photograph, read "Photo: Virginia Dwan." It was a credit line, but because the photographer was the owner of a prominent 57th Street gallery, the reader could also infer that the image served as a teaser for an upcoming exhibition at the Dwan Gallery. The next issue of Artforum carried a full-page enlargement of the same photograph. A line of text in bold capitals added along the lower edge of the photograph read "EARTH WORKS OCTOBER DWAN NEW YORK."

But there is another significance to that first photograph's three little words. Beyond identifying Dwan as the photographer, they more importantly indicate that she had been present on that first jaunt of discovery down this muddy road. Dwan was not a silent partner who wrote checks but an active contributor, one who went along for more than the ride.

After graduating from high school in Minneapolis, Dwan went to Los Angeles with her mother in 1950; her father was dead. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, majoring in studio art and minoring in psychology, but she married, had a daughter and left school before getting her degree. With the support of a substantial family inheritance, Dwan opened her first gallery in the Westwood section of Los Angeles in 1959, using her own family name. Initially, hers was not a gallery showing regional luminaries or up and-coming locals. Rather, Dwan soon became an important source in Southern California for work by major New York- and Paris-based postwar artists, such as Arman, Philip Guston, Yves Klein, Franz Kline and Robert Rauschenberg. Borrowing work from Leo Castelli, she gave Rauschenberg his first West Coast exhibition. The visiting European and New York artists often stayed at the guest accommodations of the Malibu home she shared with her husband and daughter. She has recalled, "I was able to get to know the artists quite well personally that way, and have wonderful dinner conversations. It was a wonderful growing experience for me...." (2) In turn, her artists were devoted to her, and in later years Heizer, Edward Kienholz, Larry Rivers and Jean Tinguely made portraits of her.

In June 1962, Dwan expanded to a larger space, the design of which, as she describes it, was meant to give the visitor a sense of having passed into a contemplative environment. Inspired by a San Francisco shop designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the most distinctive feature of which is its entryway of broad, deeply recessed arches (the shop is still there, off Union Square on Maiden Lane), Dwan had her architect create "... a very broad arch in a kind of tunnel effect as you came [in] ... to have a sense of setting aside one's other rush-rush attitudes from the street and then going into this lit space." (3) The description corresponds to her avowed "spiritual and mystical" orientation, a tendency that drew her to the work of both Yves Klein and Ad Reinhardt, whom she also exhibited.

Latin' in 1962, she strengthened her connections to New York by hiring John Weber, formerly the director of Martha Jackson Gallery there, to be her gallery director. Weber had arrived at Martha Jackson after serving in the Korean War, attending Antioch College in Ohio and beginning his career in 1958 as a curatorial assistant at the Dayton Art institute. Among the exhibitions he had organized at Jackson was Allan Kaprow's famous "Environments, Situations, Spaces" (May-June 1961), which included Yard, a jumble of tires in the gallery's backyard. In Los Angeles, Weber brought younger, less-established artists into the Dwan Gallery mix. The Californian Edward Kienholz, for example, had a solo show there in June 1963. Dwan also put on a large group exhibition, "Boxes" (February 1964), for which Andy Warhol made his first box pieces--three Brillos and a Heinz. (4)

Dwan's ambition and wit during this period were evident in an advertisement she placed in the summer 1964 issue of Art International. In a black-and-white snapshot, the dealer (identified by her married name, Kondratief) is shown seated in a gondola with Weber and five artists she represented--Shusaku Arakawa, Charles Frazier, Kienholz, Martial Raysse and Tinguely--traversing a canal lined with palm trees and stucco bungalows. Across the photograph Dwan had written, "Greetings from Venice, California, Dwan Gallery." The punning pseudo-postcard, timed to coincide with the Venice Biennale, claimed attention for her international roster in southern California. It also depicted her as one of the boys, or, more poetically, as a kind of Cleopatra floating down the river with a boatful of male artists.

Dwan was then visiting New York with increasing frequency, and in 1964 she became a patron of the Park Place Gallery, the artists' cooperative directed at that time by John Gibson. In November 1965, she opened her own branch in New York, dramatically inaugurating her gallery at 29 West 57th Street with Barney's Beanery, an environmental tableau by Kienholz. That month, when Kenneth Snelson, seeking his first gallery, left his portfolio with Dwan's receptionist, he doubted that anyone promoting Kienholz's scabrous realism would be interested in his own gleaming networks of steel pipe and cables. Soon, however, Dwan visited his Spring Street studio and offered him a show on the spot. LeWitt was another artist whose work she responded to immediately, and when in the spring of 1966 LeWitt introduced her to Smithson, she was particularly receptive. Within a few months, Smithson, along with Morris, was meeting with Reinhardt to organize a Dwan exhibition of the sort of reductive geometric abstraction that had made such an impact that spring at the Jewish Museum's "Primary Structures" exhibition. Their show, bluntly titled "10" after the number of artists included, opened Dwan's fall schedule with work by Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Morris, Reinhardt, Smithson and Michael Steiner. The show was widely seen and talked about, and, according to critic Lucy R. Lippard, it "made Dwan the hot bed of 'cool art.'" (5) At the end of 1966, Smithson had his first solo show with Dwan, a group of complex multipart Minimalist steel sculptures.

It was in the winter, and the ground was really frozen. The reason for the trip was--among other things--to dig up the dirt for this "Site/Nonsite" that Bob [Smithson] had in mind. Well, none of us had seen it, of course, at this point. We didn't really know for sure what he was doing, but we loved doing the field trip part of it. So I have photographs that I took of all of us standing around in fur coats in this really frigid landscape, with nothing in sight, and Bob digging very important shovelsful of dirt and putting them into gunny sacks, which were then thrown in to the back of the car. Some time later, they evolved into this wonderful octagonal piece of sculpture, metal bins and that particular dirt in these graduating metal bins. Now, these metal bins were like segments on the map.... So that instead of being an earthwork on the ground, it was an earthwork in the gallery, essentially

--Virginia Dwan. (6)

A couple of months after Dwan and Smithson met, he gave a talk on "Art and the City" at Yale, and an alumnus in the audience, an architect with the Manhattan firm Tippetts-Abhett-McCarthy-Stratton, hired Smithson as a consultant on the inclusion of art in T.A.M.S.'s proposal to build the future Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Rejecting the convention of works of art placed in the terminal, Smithson developed the idea of large-scale sculptures lying on and parallel to the earth, made of concrete and glass, some with yellow fog lights, or of low cutting earth mounds. They were intended to be viewed by passengers in airplanes landing or ascending, but television cameras (location unspecified) would also relay images of them to passengers in the terminal. Smithson asked around for other sculpture to work with him in devising ground-level works for this potential project; only Andre, LeWitt and Morris expressed interest.

When Smithson's contract with T.A.M.S. ended in Jane 1967 with the firm's participation in the airport construction uncertain, he turned to Dwan to acquire land where he and the other artists could carry out their ideas. (In 1968, the airport board retained T.A.M.S. as the engineers of the airport but chose other architectural firms to design it.) In the beginning of an unfinished article, Smithson wrote, "On a bright Sunday morning sometime in the Spring of 1966 [actually, 1967], a group of us, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Virginia Dwan, my wife Nancy [Holt, who would herself become a Land artist], and I set out on a cartographical expedition in a Rent-A-Car station wagon to make site selections for an 'earth-moving' project in South Jersey." (7) Dwan took pictures of that wagon and, another time, of Smithson, Holt and Andre on an excursion to the Pine Barrens to look for land project sites. Holt prepared letters to six town clerks in southern New Jersey in which Dwan requested that they inform her immediately of prospective tax sales of land, particularly in the Pine Barrens plains area. Nothing was available.

Stymied by the lack of nearby land on which to work, Smithson and Dwan decided to organize the "Earth Works" show in the gallery. "Earth Works" included both works of art and documentation of projects, completed or envisioned, by 10 male sculptors. Among them was Smithson's Franklin Nonsite (1968), a series of five progressively larger trapezoidal bins containing limestone gathered at a mineral dump in Franklin, N.J., the "nonsite's" complementary "site." The piece was accompanied by an aerial map of the site cut into five trapezoidal pieces corresponding to the bins, 20 Instamatic snapshots of the site and a descriptive paragraph that offered tours of the location. Oppenheim's 6-by-3-foot maquette and accompanying text proposed a reconstruction of the Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador--a locale strongly associated in art history with Hudson River painter Frederic E. Church (1826-1900), whose dramatic depictions of it are well known. Oppenheim's version was to be realized in Smith Center, Kans., the geographical center of the United States. Morris presented the aforementioned Earthwork, a mound sprawled across the gallery floor. (A black plastic sheet served to protect the gray carpet.) Andre, while a visiting artist in Aspen, Colo., the previous summer, had created a roughly 100-foot-long segmented Log Piece and a (16-inch-high Rock Pile, and Dwan had these photographed for "Earth Works."

Heizer was represented in "Earth Works" by a 6-foot-square, backlit transparency picturing five randomly arranged 12-foot-long troughs hacked into a bleached and desiccated lake bed in Nevada as seen against a vivid blue sky. This work, titled Dissipate #2, was one of the Nine Nevada Depressions he had made the previous summer, courtesy of collector Robert Scull, who had agreed to fund the project after being told that critic David Bourdun would write about it for Life magazine. Heizer had made contact with Scull through his friend De Maria, whose work Scull had collected and commissioned. Scull also purchased the only piece sold from "Earth Works," De Maria's painting The Color Men Use When They Attack the Earth (1968). This 7-by-20-foot monochrome painting in the yellow hue of Caterpillar-brand earth-moving equipment has affixed to its center a stainless steel plaque inscribed with its title phrase. De Maria had sent Weber instructions for the creation of this painting in a letter from Munich, Germany, where he was planning his Earth Room with dealer Heiner Friedrich. Scull purchased the painting for the same sum, $3,000, that De Maria owed him at the time. (8)

The first large-scale environmental work that Dwan funded was Heizer's Double Negative--the work that she described above as extending the gallery west to Nevada. Beginning around November 1969 for a January 1970 solo shiny with Dwan, Heizer made massive open cuts mirroring each other in the opposite faces of irregular extensions of a desert mesa 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. This sculpting of land in the West was presented on 57th Street by means of huge photographs--on the poster described above and, even larger, in the gallery. Recalling how her artists would represent such unusual work in her space, Dwan stated, "In Heizer's ease, [he said], 'I'd like to cover up a whole wall with a blown-up photograph. How does that sit with you?' It was not an art object, and was I willing to turn the gallery over to something that wasn't terribly commercial? And yes, I was." (9)

Following the exhibition, Dwan paid for the purchase of the square mile of land within which the mesa is located, 600 feet above the Virgin River outside Overrun, Nev., and she funded the work's enlargement to its final size. For her part in bringing this work to fruition, Dwan received co-ownership (with Heizer) of both it and the land. She later said, "The Double Negative was the largest single sculpture in the world at that point.... [Heizer] made two canyons facing each other; the walls were about 50 feet high, and the base of these cuts was about 30 feet across.... [The span from the top of one cut's ramp, down the slope, across the chasm, and up the ramp at the other side is 1,500 feet.] it was rather like being in a cathedral in reverse." (10) She hosted the visit of a small international group of museum directors and curators, collectors and journalists to the site. (In 1985, Dwan, who by arrangement with Heizer was then sole owner of Double Negative, donated it to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.)

Also in 1970, Dwan contributed to Hutchinson's Paricutin Volcano Project. And that year she was instrumental in the construction of the iconic earthwork, Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970). In an article published in the June 1907 issue of Artforum, Smithson had been the first to announce the practice of, and to use the term, "earth works" (as two words) in an art context: "A 'borings,' like other 'earth works,' is becoming more and more important to artists. Pavements, holes, trenches, mounds, heaps, paths, ditches, roads, terraces, etc., all have an esthetic potential." (11) Later, after reading that salt lakes in southern Bolivia had bizarre reddish water--catalyzed by the interaction of saline water and certain microscopic algae--he sought a similarly vivid body of water in the continental U.S. Mono Lake in California was saline but not red; in March 1970 Smithson discovered the vivid lavender-red water at Rozel Point, in a small bay on the northern edge of the Great Salt Lake. Smithson contracted with the state government for a 20-year lease (since then renewed) of 10 acres of lake, shoreline and hillside. An earth-moving company took dirt and rock from the hillside below the road along the point and dumped it into the lake to form a 15-foot-wide roadway that juts straight out from the shoreline and then turns left into a massive spiral. Dwan advanced him funds for hiring the earth-moving company; the Ace Gallery of Vancouver, B.C., also contributed to the $25,000 cost of its construction and Smithson's 35-minute film about it. Smithson subsequently repaid Dwan for the construction costs by giving her a few of his indoor sculptures. (In 1999, the Lannan Foundation purchased four works from the Smithson estate for loan to the Dia Foundation, and Holt gave Spiral Jetty to Dia.)

Within a couple of years of its completion, Jetty was submerged by the rising water table and was generally under shallow water until the summer of 1993, when the level began dropping; by 1995, one could walk on it again. Since then, the water has risen and dropped once more, leaving the work exposed in 2002. Jetty's interaction with the varying water level of the Great Salt Lake has commonly been cited as exemplifying Smithson's engagement with the condition of entropy, a system's tendency toward decreasing energy and a lesser state of order (such as the ultimate cessation of a pendulum's swing to an inert vertical). In fact, the exact opposite has occurred. Whether under a couple of feet of water or exposed, the graphic shape has retained its rock-edged linearity, and the immersion in saline water has frosted not just the edge but the entire surface with crusty white salt crystals, thus increasing the contrast between the glistening spiral and the otherworldly roseate water at Rozel Point. It has performed exactly as Smithson projected in his land-lease request: "The purpose of placing the rock on the mud flat area will be to induce salt crystals on the rock and gravel as incrustations that will develop over a period of time." (12) However, five years of drought in the western U.S. have produced the unforeseen situation that Jetty is no longer a jetty. The water level has receded to expose the entire site, leaving the work as a low white spiral mound embedded in blindingly white salt flats. This remarkable turn of events has stimulated newspaper reports and an increasing number of visitors, some of whom have driven directly unto the salt bed and along Jetty's long arm. On an October 2003 trip I observed visitors leaving with armloads of souvenir rocks that they had removed from Jetty [see "Front Page," Jan. '04].

Dwan closed her gallery in June 1971; with the continuing Vietnam War, rising inflation, high unemployment and the political constriction of the flow of oil from Middle Eastern sources, the country was headed into a recession. In an interview, Dwan spoke of professional "burnout" and said she was weary of being responsible for 13 artists' careers. (13) However, she continued to be involved with a few of the artists she had formerly represented. In 1974, she funded the test site for De Maria's Lightning Field This gridded expanse of poles grew out of a spring 1969 exhibition at Dwan Gallery of De Maria's five-piece steel floor work Bed of Spikes (1969). For the show, a curtain closed off the doorway to the gallery, and visitors had to sign a formal release exempting Dwan and De Maria from legal responsibility for any accidental impalements that might occur. Time magazine reported on this theatrical presentation: "During the show, more than 2,500 visitors came to titter nervously or gaze in horrified wonder at De Maria's five Indian fakir-like steel beds. Together they contain 153 upright 11-inch spikes, honed to the sharpness of a Viet Cong punji stake." (14) Dwan owned Bed of Spikes, and, when De Maria wanted to sell it to a Swiss museum that had expressed interest in it, he gave her in return full title to the extension of the Bed of Spikes onto the land--essentially a test run for his dramatic Lightning Field. In June 1974, De Maria implanted 35 stainless-steel poles, each 18 feet tall, spaced 200 feet apart in a five-by-seven-pole grid on northern Arizona land owned by collectors Emily and Burton Tremaine. This work was dismantled in 1976, and Dwan eventually gave the poles to Dia. In 1977, the Dia Art Foundation acquired land in New Mexico and funded De Maria's construction of the present Lightning Field--400 poles spaced 220 feet apart in a 1-mile-by-1-kilometer grid. Dia owns Lightning Field and administers visits, which require an approximately 24-hour stay; a maximum of six visitors per night are driven to a modest cabin at an unspecified site outside of Quemada, N.M., where they are dropped off with a dinner casserole and breakfast food and retrieved the next day.

For me, one of the appeals of this work was that it did not generate new objects in the old sense.... It was like you dug a hole out of what already existed and displaced it perhaps, but you didn't take the material, put it in furnace, change it into something else, make another object, and put it on a pedestal. Somehow there was this sense for me of almost a nausea [...] of objects. Not just art objects, certainly, being ground out all over the surface of the earth. And this was going back to the elements and sort of saying, "I'm going to work right here with this and not alter it that much, just give it a different shape." I found that very satisfying, very relieving, in a certain way--Virginia Dwan (15)

In one of his columns for The Nation, in March 1969, Max Kozloff addressed Earth art's transgressive qualities. "You cannot expect this art to be shoveled into your living room and still preserve the way it looked in the gallery, or keep distinct the boundary lines between aesthetic charade and domestic living. You cannot expect, in fact you are defied, to want to buy it. And it is easy to imagine the discomfort of those whose role obliges them to sell it." (16) Yet both Dwan and Gibson, who in 1968 gave Oppenheim his first solo show in New York--of maquettes of potential earth projects--and in 1969 presented "Ecologic Art," sought out this difficult-to-commodify work. Dwarfs efforts to sell Reinhardt's darkly severe paintings to Los Angelinos had already demonstrated her interest in art that was both contemplative and challenging. As she noted, "I was seeking it out because to me it was very exciting in that it stretched me." (17) Smithson unintentionally corroborated this explanation by noting about Dwan's involvement with earth projects, "She was interested in the development of consciousness as much as anybody else." (18)

Comments like that make one realize that, while a common rationale for creating these huge eccentric environments sculpted in remote terrains is that their creators sought to thwart the commerce of art, in actuality earthwork artists had a close relation to their dealers. With Dwan, they accepted her patronage, shared her companionship and through her sold documentation and interior portable sculptures. Smithson's date books show that he and Nancy Holt frequented Dwan's apartment for dinners and parties, and Dwan recalls that Smithson came into the gallery nearly every day to talk with her, Weber and/or other artists visiting there. (19) De Maria and Heizer also had close ongoing relationships with Dwan.

Of course, she could afford to take on difficult-to-sell art--her economic independence and interest in personal growth sometimes allowed her to identify more with her artists than with fellow dealers. "As much as I don't like to think of it as a money issue," she recalled, "I have to acknowledge the fact that I had a private income myself which made it possible for me to take a more idealistic stand, or devote myself more to the artist than perhaps a lot of other dealers would be able to do." (20)

At the same time, she did not think of earthworks as beyond the marketplace. "In some cases," she noted, "you could perhaps own the lease to, say, a Smithson. In other cases--Double Negative for instance--the work has always been for sale. At one point, there were buyers, but we decided to hold onto it longer. But it's definitely to be owned, just as Scull owned his pieces out on the land there [Heizer's Nine Nevada Depressions]. It's more that it wasn't another object or gadget in space." (21) What she was offering was not so much an artist's product but an environmental experience. This erosion of the distinction between what can and cannot be sold was an economic coefficient of the back-and-forth movement implied by Smithson's site and nonsite dialectic and of the blurring of an exhibition space's physical boundaries.

Another distinctive aspect of Dwan's patronage is the gender of her artists. No woman had a solo show at her gallery or has been a beneficiary of her substantial patronage. Women were included in the group exhibitions guest-curated by her gallery artists, in "10," as noted above, and in the large group summer shows devoted to "Language" (1967-70), which, according to Smithson, were organized by himself and LeWitt. Andre and LeWitt separately tried to interest Dwan in bringing Eva Hesse into the gallery, but they were unsuccessful. (22) In regard to earthworks, both Dwan and the art world in general were bound by social conventions that implicitly excluded women artists; furthermore, site closed her gallery in 1971, just as the feminist art movement was getting started. Considering the age-old cross-cultural associations of women with signs of nature (flowers, foliage, the moon, the sea), it is significant that there were no women among the first-generation earthworkers whom Dwan exhibited in 1968. In the major survey exhibition "American Sculpture of the '60s," organized by the Los Angeles County Museum in 1967, Judy Gerowitz (later, Chicago), Louise Nevelson and Anne Truitt all showed work done in approximately the same abstract quasi-modular, technologically savvy mode preferred by many ambitious male artists of the period. One gets the sense that in that pre-feminist era, women artists would have actively rejected an affiliation with nature (as did the males, though they could work in earth and dirt without eliciting such archaic associations). At the same time, the absence of women early on in the development of Earth art can also be attributed to the fact that the making of earthworks was dependent on patronage. And all the artists who attracted this kind of support--from Dwan, but also from such other figures as Douglas Chrismas, Heiner Friedrich, Gibson and Scull--were male. Beginning in the early 1970s, encouraged by the feminist art movement, Alice Aycock, Agnes Denes, Holt, Mary Miss and Michele Stuart began making bold environmental works. Pragmatically incorporating into their work various structural reinforcements made from steel, concrete or lumber to achieve more stable or permanent constructions on natural terrain, these artists were soon supported by institutional commissions from museums, universities and major periodic international exhibitions. These differing practices distinguish them from Earth artists, and their production is more accurately called Land art.

I support works that I believe should be built--that are inspiring works of art. Art can answer some of our spiritual needs.--Virginia Dwan (23)

In ensuing years, Dwan has continued to aid construction of environmental-scale works by certain artists, all of whom she has known since representing them in her New York gallery more than 30 years ago. She has been a contributor to Heizer's City (1972 and ongoing), a continuing construction project of solid structures arranged around a massive open court at an unidentified site in the Nevada desert. She likewise is a substantial funder of sculptor Charles Ross's Star Axis (1971 and ongoing), a huge sculpted observatory built on the isolated Chupinas Mesa, some distance outside Santa Fe, N.M. Its chambers and tunnel will allow visitors to perceive the earth's rotation and its changing alignments with the stars. (Although Ross was not among Dwan's early group of artists, she did include him among the 12 who showed in her 1971 closing exhibition.)

In the early 1990s, Dwan originated such a project herself when she conceived a circular space for contemplation; her design called for the numbers of windows, skylights and apses to combine in ratios of 12 and its factors. (In numerological mysticism, 12 is the product of three, which signifies dynamism or inner spirituality, and four, which stands for stability or outer activity. Together, they represent wholeness.) She brought Ross in on the project, and he designed the slightly conical space with window openings positioned in relation to astronomical movements. He also installed 24 of his long glass prisms in niches and skylights to project swaths of brilliant spectrums throughout the interior of the structure. This Dwan Light Sanctuary (1996) was built by architect Laban Wingert at the United World College in Montezuma, N.M. Dwan gave it to the college as a gift.

In the few years during which earthworks were conceived and realized--from the late 1960s through the early '70s, and thereafter for a few continuing projects--a very avant-garde form of art was made possible by the distinctly premodern mode of funding that is private patronage. The outsider status of earthworks--eccentric in their visionary designs, distant from the venues of advanced culture and their audiences, independent of institutions--required private commitment by courageous individuals of means. Supporting artists' grandly radical ideas with grand and rare kinds of patronage, Dwan stimulated a productive synergy that made important, ongoing contributions to art history.

(1.) Virginia Dwan, interviewed by Charles Stuckey, Archives of American Art, May 1984, tape 9, p. 18.

(2.) Ibid., tape 1, p. 14.

(3.) Ibid., tape 1, p. 4; tape 2, p. 2.

(4.) Author's conversation with John Weber, Aug. 14, 1997. Among the 39 artists in "Boxes" were Larry Bell, Lee Bontecou and Lucas Samaras.

(5.) Snelson's recollection is from a conversation with the author, Jan. 22, 2003. Dwan's recollection about LeWitt introducing Smithson is from Stuckey, tape 5, p. 14. Lucy R. Lippard, "Intersections," Flyktpunkter/Vanishing Points, Stockholm, Moderna Museet, 1984, p. 12.

(6.) Stuckey, tape 7, p. 24.

(7.) Robert Smithson, "Atlantic City," Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1996, p. 332. His designation of 1966 is incorrect, as in the spring of that year he had not yet become the airport consultant and begun such exploration for artistic purposes. In a 1672 interview, Smithson describes that same excursion and correctly attributes it to the spring of 1967. Paul Cummings, "Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution," Flare, p. 292.

(8.) Letter from De Maria to Weber, formerly in the Dwan Gallery Archives, and letter from De Maria to Scull from Antwerp, Belgium, Ethel Scull Papers, Archives of American Art. For a detailed analysis of this exhibition, see Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 2002.

(9.) Stuckey, tape 8, p. 13.

(10.) Ibid., tape 8, p. 13. The 1970 poster/exhibition announcement lists the size of Double Negative as 1,100 by 42 by 30 feet with a "displacement" of 40,000 tons. It was subsequently enlarged to 1,590 by 50 by 30 feet, with 240,000 tons of rhyolite and sandstone removed from between the 50 foot-high walls. Stuckey, tape 9, p. 20.

(11.) Smithson, "Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site," in Flam, p. 56.

(12.) Correspondence from Smithson to Charles R. Hansen, director, Division of State Lands, Utah, Papers of Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, reel 3833, frame 90.

(13.) Stuckey, tape 10, p. 5. Weber, who had become director of Dwan's New York gallery when she closed in Los Angeles in June 1067, opened a gallery in his own name on West Broadway in SoHo and continued showing many of the artists Dwan had represented.

(14.) Time, May 2, 1969, p. 54.

(15.) Stuckey, tape 8, p. 8.

(16.) Max Kozloff, "Art," The Nation, Mar. 17, 1969, p. 347.

(17.) Stuckey, tape 2, p. 16.

(18.) Cummings, Flam, p. 292.

(19.) Ibid, tape 8, p. 36.

(20.) Ibid., tape 2, p. 15.

(21.) Ibid., tape 8, p. 13.

(22.) Dwan New York's large group summer shows devoted to "Language" (1967-70) and, according to Smithson, organized by himself and LeWitt included in various years Rosemary Castoro, Hanne Darboven, Agnes Denes, Madeline Gins, Lila Katzen, Christine Kozlov, Lee Lozano, Adrian Piper, Dorothea Rockburne, Elaine Sturtevant and Martha Wilson. Author's conversations with Andre and LeWitt.

(23.) Dwan, conversation with the author, Feb. 11, 2003.

Author: Suzaan Boettger teaches art history at Bergen Community College, New Jersey, and is the author of Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, University of California Press, 2002.

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