Robert Smithson


Selected Bibliography
Robert Smithson: Sculpture. Ed. Robert Hobbs. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Texts by Lawrence Alloway, John Coplans, Robert Hobbs, and Lucy R. Lippard. Robert Smithson: Photo Works. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in association with University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1993. Text by Robert A. Sobieszek. Robert Smithson: Operations on Nature. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1994. Texts by Iain Baxter, Robert Fones, Rodney Graham, and Matthew Teitelbaum. Smithson, Robert. The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Text by Robert Smithson, and interviews with Liza Bear, Paul Cummings, Bruce Kurtz, Thomas W. Leavitt, William C. Lipke, Patsy Norvell, Gregoire Müller, Gianni Pettena, Eva Schmidt, Anthony Robbin, Moira Roth, Alison Sky, Paul Toner, and Dennis Wheeler. Robert Smithson Retrospective: Works 1955–1973. Oslo: National Museum of Contemporary Art, in association with Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, 1999. Texts by Per Boym, Stian Grøgaard, Tim Martin, Anette østerby, and Vibeke Petersen. Reynolds, Ann. Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002.


Biography
Robert Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1938. In 1953, as a high-school student, he won a scholarship to New York's Art Students League, where he studied in the evenings for the next two years, also taking classes at the Brooklyn Museum School in 1956. Smithson's first solo exhibition was in 1959, at the Artist's Gallery, New York. He began to produce what he considered his first mature works of writing and sculpture in 1964. Smithson used black basalt rocks and earth from the site surrounding the Great Salt Lake in Utah, to create the monumental Earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970), a coil 1,500 feet long and fifteen feet wide that stretches out counterclockwise into the translucent red water of the lake. Smithson died in a plane crash in Amarillo, Texas, in 1973, while working on Amarillo Ramp. Major retrospectives of his work have been organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York (1980), the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Centre Julio González, Valencia (1993), and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (1999). In 1999, Dia acquired his Spiral Jetty as a gift of his estate.