Additional information
by Robert Smithson (Artist), Teresita Fernández (Artist), Lisa Le Feuvre (Text by (Art/Photo Books))
Initiated by Fernández's long-term engagement with challenging socially constructed ideas about place and landscape and her immersive research on Smithson's art and ideas, Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson explores convergences and divergences in the artists' thinking and making around sites, seeing, deep time, the cosmos, the subterranean, material intelligence, geological agency, and cartographic fictions.
Produced in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at SITE SANTA FE, this volume is structured as a subjective, intergenerational conversation between two artists whose conceptual, research-based practices take form through experimental sculptural approaches to matter and material. The book's structure tracks closely with the organization of the show, as rooms centered on resonant themes in the artists' work become chapters in the publication for the reader to navigate at a different pace. In addition to a text by Fernández, written initially as part of a performance at SITE, and selected writing from and excerpted interviews with Smithson, the book includes new essays by Lisa Le Feuvre, the co-curator of the exhibition and Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation; Carla Acevedo-Yates; and Lucy R. Lippard, along with an excerpt of a republished text by Nadiah Rivera Fellah and a conversation between Fernández and fellow artist Cecilia Vicuña.
The work of Teresita Fernández can be found in the collections of the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Ford Foundation, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; LVMH Collection, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; New Orleans Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum; Palm Springs Art Museum; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Saint Louis Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; Speed Art Museum, Louisville; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of Art.
The work of Robert Smithson is held in numerous public collections around the world, including the Dia Art Foundation, New York and Beacon; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York among others.
Author Biography
Teresita Fernández (b. 1968) expansively rethinks what constitutes landscape. Her artistic practice and research move from the subterranean to the cosmic, from political borders to the elusive psychic landscapes we carry within. Unraveling the intimacies between matter, human beings, and locations through large-scale sculpture, site-specific installation, film, and works on paper that are all materially and conceptually driven, Fernández seeks to reveal the inherent violence embedded in how we imagine and define place. Fernández's work poetically challenges ideas of power, visibility, and erasure in connection to site and landscape.
Robert Smithson (1938-1973) expanded what art could be and where it could be found. For over 50 years, his writings, artworks, and ideas have influenced generations of artists and thinkers to consider site-specificity and land in relation to conceptual and minimalist practices. From his landmark earthworks to his "quasi-minimalist" sculptures, Nonsites, writings, proposals, collages, drawings, and radical rethinking of landscape, Smithson's ideas remain relevant for our times. By investigating the conceptual and physical boundaries of knowledge, he raised essential questions about our place in the world.
Lisa Le Feuvre (b. 1955) is a curator, writer, editor, and public speaker. Previously based in the UK, she is the inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation. She has curated more than seventy exhibitions, edited over thirty books and journals, spoken at 150 museums and universities across the world, and has published more than 125 essays and interviews with artists.
Carla Acevedo-Yates (b. 1978) was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and has worked as a curator, researcher, and art critic across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. Currently, she is a curator at the MCA Chicago.
Lucy R. Lippard (b. 1937) is a renowned American writer, activist, feminist, art critic, and curator. She has contributed to art publications for over sixty years, and has written twenty-six art historical and creative non-fiction books. She is a co-founder of Printed Matter, the Heresies Collective, Political Art Documentation/Distribution, and other artists' organizations and has curated over fifty exhibitions. Her latest title, entitled Stuff: Instead of a Memoir, was published in 2023. Lippard is based in Galisteo, New Mexico.
Nadiah Rivera Fellah is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She specializes in Latin American and global contemporary art and has held positions at the Newark Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.
The precarious works of Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948) integrate poetry, performance, art, and sound in response to pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Vicuña has had a number of high-profile solo exhibitions worldwide, including recent shows at the Tate Modern, London and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She is the author of 27 volumes of art and poetry published in the US, Europe, and Latin America. Vicuña has received several awards, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2022).
