Remote land art masterpieces worth the journey across the U.S.

Nancy Holt installed Sun Tunnels from 1973 to 1976 in the heart of Utah’s Great Basin Desert. It consists of four gigantic concrete tubes drilled with holes aligned with constellations. The formation encircles the sun on the horizon during the solstices. Wolfe shares that Holt’s art is driven by the artist’s interest in perception, time, space, and humanity’s relationship to the natural world.

​In 1979, Holt created Star-Crossed at Miami University’s sculpture park in Ohio, based on the observation that true north and magnetic north meet at Oxford, Ohio. Wolfe notes Holt often used tunnels, framed views, celestial alignments, and observational structures to shift viewer awareness of their place within the universe.

Holt’s husband, Robert Smithson, created the ​Spiral Jetty on Utah’s Great Salt Lake shore in 1970. The massive 1,500-foot-long counterclockwise coil was created with 6,000 tons of black basalt at Rozel Point Peninsula. Smithson embraced entropy, knowing the piece was at nature’s whim. “In 1972, rising waters submerged the work entirely for three decades before Spiral Jetty re-emerged in the early 2000s,” Emily Lawhead, Associate Curator at Utah Museum of Fine Arts, says.

​Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973 while working in Texas on Amarillo Ramp at the base of an artificial lake, which Holt later completed. Though now overgrown with mesquite, Amarillo Ramp can be visited by reservation.

​The Lightning Field in western New Mexico was erected in 1977 by Walter De Maria, who arranged 400 stainless steel poles in a mile-long rectangular grid in an area with a high incidence of electrical storms. “The piece feels alive through the dynamic tension and energy it creates at the interface between earth and sky,” Elizabeth Monoian, co-founder of Land Art Generator Initiative, says.

During a thunderstorm, the piece is fully realized when nature and art interact, with lightning striking the javelins. For safety, the artwork is best viewed from a distance during such weather, but in clear conditions, visitors are welcome to walk around the installation.

Double Negative, in Mormon Mesa, Nevada, was created in 1969 by Michael Heizer, who dug two nine-meter-wide and 15-meter-deep trenches by blasting dynamite to move 240,000 tons of rock. “Heizer’s works involve excavation, displacement, and massive alterations to the landscape, challenging traditional ideas of sculpture as an isolated object,” Wolfe says. 

​For 50 years, in Nevada’s Garden Valley, he constructed City, a cinder-block structure completed in 2022. The megasculpture can be visited by reservation only and is 1.5 miles long and a half-mile wide. It’s made of concrete, dirt, and rock, with shaped mounds and depressions, including an altar and a plaza with rows of increasingly large triangles and rectangles. 

Andy Goldsworthy uses materials including water, flowers, leaves, ice, stone, and branches to emphasize the natural processes of decay and transformation. In San Francisco’s Presidio National Park, Goldsworthy has created four pieces using materials found onsite. ​

Spire (2008), built from 37 felled Monterey cypress trunks and reaching 90 feet, was inspired by the form of church bell towers. Wood Line (2011) uses 1,200 feet of eucalyptus branches laid in curves across a eucalyptus grove. Tree Fall (2013), was constructed from a felled eucalyptus tree, and Earth Wall (2014), is a six-foot-wide half-sphere of curved eucalyptus branches. “Goldworthy works in harmony with the ecologies that are his canvas. By using natural materials, he reduces the impact of his art on the environment,” Monoian says.