The first time I encountered the concept of “land art” was during an art history course I took at the University of New Mexico in 2013. It was there that I saw images of Robert Smithson’s land art piece Spiral Jetty, which sits in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The 15-by-1,500-foot sculpture struck me as interesting but not terribly arresting. Much as I had with Maya Deren’s experimental films and David Gatten’s placement of film underwater in a crab trap to literally find out What the Water Said, Nos. 1–3 (1998), I cataloged Spiral Jetty as another eccentric type of art by a white person I had never heard of before. It didn’t resonate with me like a Jean-Luc Godard film or a T.C. Cannon painting, but it taught me a valuable lesson: people were out there doing far-out shit.
My dad is a Comanche artist who paints primarily “traditional” types of Indigenous art. I hate that word “traditional,” but it’s
