Robert Smithson

Born in Passaic, New Jersey, Robert Smithson studied painting at the Art Students League, New York, and the Brooklyn Museum School in the mid 1950s. After a visit to Rome in 1961, Smithson began to fuse his Abstract Expressionist style with the religious subject matter of Byzantine art. It was only after his marriage to the sculptor Nancy Holt in 1963 that he began to sculpt in the Minimalist idiom. In 1966 Smithson began a series entitled Nonsite sculptures. In these pieces, he removed elements from a specific site and presented them in a gallery. The most elaborate of these projects revolved around the Cayuga Salt Mine in upstate New York and resulted in numerous sculptures and photographs, including Oberlin's Slant Piece. The Nonsite series marked the beginning of Smithson's interest in questions of site, environment, and nature in his sculpture. These concerns culminated in his monumental Earthworks. Spiral Jetty (Utah, 1970), for example, used the bank of the Great Salt Lake to create a spiral-shaped form that referred to such ancient earthworks as the snake mounds in southern Ohio or the pyramids in Egypt. Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973. His final earthwork project--Amarillo Ramp (Amarillo, Texas, 1973)--was completed by Nancy Holt, Richard Serra, and Tony Shafrazi.