LAND/ART Tours & Excursions

archived chronologically by date

ARCHIVED 2009

Talk & Walking Tour: Anitya by Anne Cooper at Los Poblanos Open Space Community Gardens
Saturday, June 6, (1 hour)



This was a temporary installation and will included a talk and a walk with the artist around the City of Albuquerque Los Poblanos Open Space fields. Sponsored by the Contemporary Art Society of New Mexico (CAS) and LARC (the Land Art Committee).

For information please contact CAS at casartnm@gmail.com or 505-244-8777.

image: installation process, photo courtesy of Basia Irland

Bus Tour: Center for Land Use Interpretation
LAND/ART Symposium Weekend
Saturday, June 27

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) took passengers on a guided bus tour through some of the more compelling and dramatic built landscapes of New Mexico, places at the core of this landscape-centered state. The tour examined the cultural stratigraphy of the contemporary technological sublime; the veneer of test space; the reach upwards; the security of entombment; and the flare of the nuclear furnace.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research organization involved in exploring, examining and understanding land and landscape issues. Opening with the Second Site exhibit at 516 ARTS on August 1, they created a site-based project for LAND/ART to be presented in one of the organization's Mobile Exhibition Units installed in the Albuquerque area. Part orientation center, part destination, the space was a conceptual "point of departure" for exploring the inner and outer landscape of the region, focusing on notions of the technological sublime, for which New Mexico is notorious.

While their work is conceptual in its approach, its content is designed to be accessible to a wide audience beyond the art world. Their use of factual research and rational dialogue opens doors for communication and education about Land Art and environmental issues in a new arena which is gaining national and international recognition.


For more information contact 516 ARTS at 505-242-1445 or email info@516arts.org.

CLUI in New Mexico was presented by 516 ARTS and made possible by The FUNd at Albuquerque Community Foundation. Project coordinated by Kathleen Shields.

For more information about CLUI, please visit www.clui.org.

image: View of the CLUI Program A Tour of the Monuments of the Great American Void, CLUI Archive photo, 2005

Artist Talk & River Excursion with Basia Irland
LAND/ART Symposium Weekend
Sunday, June 28

In conjunction with receding/reseeding, an exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Santa Fe, Basia Irland presented a brief ten-minute film at the Albuquerque Museum about her ice books being floated down rivers in Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain. Across the United States seeds are released into raging streams borne of glacier melt in Washington State or springs in Missouri or languid creeks in North Carolina or the chocolate-red waters of New Mexico. Immediately following the film, she led a short excursion to the Rio Grande for the launching of ice books into the river. Visitors met one mile from the Albuquerque Museum at the north parking lot at Tingley Drive and Central Ave just before the Rio Grande Bridge. This event was co-presented with the Albuquerque Museum and Center for Contemporary Arts

Free
Excursion began at the parking lot at Tingley Drive NW & Central Ave NW. map

image: Basia Irland, Book I, Boulder, ice, seeds, video, community action

Day Trip: CLUI Display Facility
Sunday, August 2



The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) Director Matthew Coolidge led a short tour via bus to the CLUI Display Facility, a site-specific project created for LAND/ART. This facility was located at a site on the fringe of Albuquerque, drawing people in to a part of the city that is not often visited. Displayed inside was information about the region, including an exhibit about the New Mexico landscape.

The CLUI Display Facility was open to the public August 1 - September 19, weekends only, 12-5pm.

For more information on CLUI visit www.clui.org.

For information contact 516 ARTS at 505-242-1445 or email info@516arts.org.

The CLUI Display Facility was presented by 516 ARTS and made possible by The FUNd at Albuquerque Community Foundation.

image: CLUI archive photo

Tour: Star Axis by Charles Ross, Northern New Mexico
August 22



Star Axis is an “Earth-to-Star” installation, a sculpture/observatory that focuses on Earth’s place in relation to the celestial environment, located near Anton Chico, New Mexico (2 – 2.5 hour drive from Albuquerque). Tours were designed for a limited number of visitors at any one time. Sponsored by the Contemporary Art Society of New Mexico (CAS) and LARC (the Land Art Committee).

For more information on Star Axis visit www.staraxis.org.

For information on this tour please contact CAS at casartnm@gmail.com or 505-244-8777.

image: Edward Ranney, Entrance, Star Tunnel, Looking South, Star Axis, NM, 10/8/08, photograph

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Tours at The Albuquerque Open Space Visitor Center
Saturdays, July 11, August 15 and September 5

   

The City of Albuquerque's Open Space Division and the Open Space Alliance hosted six projects that embody LAND/ART New Mexico. The goal of the LAND/ART collaborative is to "explore relationships of land, art, and community through exhibitions, site-specific artworks, lectures and a culminating book. Focusing on 'environmental' or 'land' art, the collaboration seeks to address our changing relationship to nature, and to offer a new or previously unconsidered understanding of the place in which we live."

Guided tour groups met at 9:00am on the mornings of July 11, August 15 and September 5, 2009 to tour the bosque near the Open Space Visitor Center. Site-specific art works were visited, including Cube by Robert Wilson; Three Pole Sculptures by Matthew Chase-Daniel; Salt Cedar + Jetty Jacks = Green by Jill Guarino Brown; Arboreal Dome by Benjamin Forgey; Painted Jetty Jacks by Zach Meisner and A Peculiar Hush by Danielle Rae Miller. The walking distance was approximately two miles.

Guided tour excursions began at the Open Space Visitor Center, 6500 Coors Blvd (between Montaño and Paseo del Norte)
Archived map of projects.

For more information on the Open Space installations in the Bosque visit Open Space

images: Benjamin Forgey, Arboreal Dome; Zach Meisner, Painted Jetty Jacks

Walking Tour & Performance: Discovering a Vocabulary in the Landscape with William L. Fox & mARK oWEns
at THE LAND/an art site in Mountainair, New Mexico
Sunday, September 6

William L. Fox led a walking tour of THE LAND/an art site, sharing observations about current site-specific art installations. Mark Owens, poet and environmental artist, presented a site-specific performance of poetry and installation linking the written word with the landscape. Sponsored by the Contemporary Art Society of New Mexico (CAS) and LARC (the Land Art Committee).

For information please contact CAS at casartnm@gmail.com or 505-244-8777.

Urban Landscape Tour for Experimental Geography
at the Albuquerque Museum
Saturday, September 12

How do we understand our urban space? Does Albuquerque have a distinctive atmosphere? What part do we play in constructing a sense of place? Mark Childs, Director of the Town Design Program at UNM led an exploration to a collection of public spaces in and around the Albuquerque Museum to reflect upon our connections to the urban landscape.

Mark C. Childs, AIA, is director of the Town Design Certificate Program and Associate Director of Architecture at UNM. He is a Fulbright Scholar (Cyprus 2005) and author of Squares: A Public Place Design Guide, and the forthcoming Urban Composition.

Camping Excursion with New Mexico Wilderness Alliance & John Wenger
September 25 - 27, 2009
Otero Mesa Grasslands Tour & Volunteer Service Project

   

This outing was led by John Wenger, Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico, in conjunction with the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance. Participants experienced America’s largest and wildest grassland – Otero Mesa, New Mexico – made Otero Mesa art journals, helped to conduct plant and animal inventories, make prairie dog town surveys and checked out thousands of ancient petroglyph sites on Alamo Mountain.



image: Above Parking Lot, photo courtesy of Jeff Kaake

Bus Tour: A Public Art Tour of Albuquerque
Saturday, October 10
Presented by Contemporary Art Society of New Mexico



Nora Naranjo Morse, Numbe Whageh (Our Center Place in Tewa), Public art installation at the Albuquerque Museum sculpture garden, early construction phase

From the pre-historic petroglyphs on the West Mesa to the foothills of the Sandias, artists working in the Rio Grande Valley have considered this land, this place with abundant visions. The bus tour visited existing sculptural, environmental works and temporary installations being created during the LAND/ART project of 2009. Sites included work by New Mexico artists Nora Naranjo-Morse and Billie Walters, both of whom work with the earth and surrounding nature. The tour stopped at several sites on the University of New Mexico campus, which reflect 30 years of contemporary art explorations regarding the land and place. Also at UNM, the tour included several site-specific works by students of the UNM program Land Arts of the American West exhibition Dispersal/Return, in particular Culture Digest(e) by Nina Dubois and Jeanette Hart-Mann. Returning to the river for a picnic box lunch among the cottonwoods of the Rio Grande Bosque, the tour culminated at the site of a LAND/ART work-in-progress: Internationally acclaimed artist Patrick Dougherty was completing a project on the Bosque School campus, creating a fantastic environment/sculpture - a collaboration with students and volunteers using natural materials from the site.


For more information on the public art projects in Albuquerque visit www.cabq.gov/publicart