VISUAL ARTS

Pioneered in U.S., and international, mid-1960s
Site-specific or Environmental art refers to an artist’s intervention in a specific locale, creating a work that is integrated with its surroundings and that explores its relationship to the topography of its locale, whether indoors or out, urban, desert, marine, or otherwise. In its largest sense it applies to a work made by an artist in the landscape, either by radically manipulating the terrain in a remote area to produce an “earthwork” (such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty) or by creating ephemeral or removable tableaux along particular pathways so that the terrain is not permanently altered (Richard Long’s circles or lines of stones, Christo’s fabric walls or umbrellas). Other artists known for such work include Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, Robert Morris, Dennis Op...