Walter De Maria

From the moment he moved to New York from California in 1960, Walter De Maria began making work that foreshadowed much of the Minimal, Conceptual, and Land art movements of the following decade. His early experiments with wooden boxes that invite the viewer’s interaction and his quasi-invisible drawings evolved, by 1965, into polished-metal sculptures of high precision. In 1968, contending for the first time with earth as material and concept, De Maria filled an art gallery with dirt and drew two one-mile-long lines onto the dry salt lakes of California’s Mojave Desert, respectively.