Robert Smithson

Art Brokerage: Robert Smithson American Artist: b. 1938-1973. Smithson's best-known work, Spiral Jetty, was created in 1970 in the violet-red water off the northern shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake. This gigantic spiral of some 6,650 tons of earth would at times be entirely underwater in subsequent years. After a great deal of hunting, Smithson purchased a Maine island and a site in Utah for future projects. In 1971, he completed Broken Circle/Spiral Hill at a quarry near Emmen, the Netherlands. Interested in reclaiming American land for large-scale art, Smithson presented more than fifty proposals to various strip-mining companies, but was stymied in these efforts. On July 20, 1973, Smithson was aboard a small airplane to document the site for a new work called Amarillo Ramp. The plane crashed, killing Smithson, the photographer, and the pilot. Holt and others completed Amarillo Ramp the next month. Before his death, Smithson was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. His art was included in several group exhibitions that defined 1960s art, among them Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York (1966), Minimal Art at the Haags Gemeentemuseum (1968), Earth Works at Dwan Gallery in New York (1968), and Earth Art at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Cornell University in Ithaca (1969).