October 31, 2014

SeaTac artwork on endangered list

Photo by Allen Russ, courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation [enlarge]

The artwork was done by Robert Morris and completed in 1979.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation says an environmental art piece fashioned from a gravel pit in the city of SeaTac is one of 11 land-based artworks that is threatened with demolition, neglect, poor maintenance, vandalism and lack of funding.

The artwork was done by Robert Morris and was completed in 1979. It consists of concentric slopes planted with rye grass, which descend into the reclaimed gravel pit at the center.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation said in a press release that encroaching residential development, illegal dumping, vandalism and inadequate funding threaten the work.

Every year the foundation puts out a list of threatened and at-risk sites. This year's list was selected from more than 100 submissions and includes artist Leo Villareal's “Bay Lights,” an LED sculpture in San Francisco, and “The Heidelberg Project” by Tyree Guyton that repurposed vacant houses in a Detroit neighborhood.

To see all 11 artworks, go to http://tclf.org/news/pressroom/.

The foundation calls Robert Morris a pioneer in site-specific earth art installations. He created the SeaTac work after King County Arts Commission sought artist proposals for “technologically abused land” in the county.

Morris was selected from 22 artists to submit proposals for an abandoned gravel pit donated to the county by the Department of Public Works.

Charles A. Birnbaum, TCLF founder and president, said “The interrelationship of art and the landscape has yielded diverse, historically significant and irreplaceable representations of our cultural identity; however, they are often fragile, overlooked and threatened.”

The foundation is a nonprofit focused on helping people to understand and value landscape architecture.