"Suzaan Boettger offers the first comprehensive history of the Earthworks movement in the United States, providing a fascinating and in-depth analysis of the monumental forms that initiated the broader genre of Land Art. Examining the art, the artists, their dealers and proponents, Boettger interprets Earthworks as a manifestation both of artists' personal stories and of the late 1960s social and political tumult.".

"Boettger overturns many commonly held notions of Earthworks' origins and intentions. She argues that Robert Smithson's work on the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport stimulated his thinking and that his writing about it catalyzed the movement. The visionary environments that followed, often sculpted in expansive and remote western terrain, were idealized by Americans and Europeans alike as displays of cowboy bravado.

Boettger identifies earth-workers Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Morris, Walter De Maria, and Stephen Kaltenbach as former Californians whose treatment of the landscape reflects a western spirit. She highlights the instrumental participation of dealer and patron Virginia Dwan and considers the lack of women artists among the first earth-workers and their contributions in the 1970s. Her international purvue integrates early work by the Europeans Richard Long, Jan Dibbets, Barry Flanagan, and Pino Pascali, as well as the Canadian Iain Baxter, as precedents and parallels.

Her examination of Earthworks relationship to the ecology movement perceptively corrects a popular misconception about the artists goals while acknowledging the social and cultural complexities of the period." "Insightful discussions of Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Claes Oldenburg and Peter Hutchinson - in addition to the artists mentioned above - are accompanied by many rare and new photographs of both the art and its creators."--BOOK JACKET.