Art and Environment includes more than twenty contemporary art organizations in the Phoenix area presenting art that is sited in or concerned with the environment. The project will present art by artists who use visual and material languages to examine cultural, perceptual and phenomenological issues of the land, whether specific or archetypal. The inspiration for the project comes from Phoenix's heady mix of city and desert, and the history of environmental art in the area. The Southwest has a rich history for artists, beginning with ancient Native Americans and continuing through the earthwork artists of the 1960s and 70s. Today Phoenix is the sixth largest city in the nation and home to innovative eco-art projects.
Phoenix is a metaphor for the expansion of cities throughout the Southwest and the nation.
Citywide project committee is co-managed by Heather Sealy Lineberry and Felice Regnier Images are representative of work in the exhibition. The exhibition will focus on contemporary artists who are cognizant of but reject the remoteness and idealism of the earthwork artists and the didacticism of eco-artists. Robert Smithson abhorred cities and sited his land art projects in timeless landscapes with no boundaries and with alternative measures of time and history. These younger artists have found the same sense of the infinite and chaotic in urban and suburban landscapes, and find these environments more pertinent to contemporary experience. Their art is more cynical, yet also more accepting, of the resulting flawed beauty and tensions between the natural and the cultivated in the urban and suburban.