More about Michael Heizer
- All
- Info
- Shop
Works by Michael Heizer
Contributor
It is not easy to find Michael Heizer, because he doesn't really want you to.
Somewhat of a recluse, Heizer lives in a remote desert in Nevada...an hour’s drive from the nearest paved road. His love for the arid landscape may be genetic - he came from a family of geologists, miners, and anthropologists. All digging-related professions. His father, a well-known anthropologist, would take young Michael with him on his field trips to rural Nevada, Peru, and Bolivia, where he was influenced by ancient Native American burial mounds, Aztec and Mayan ruins.
Heizer tried to do the New York painting thing but found the city too crowded and confining, so he headed west in 1967 to the empty Southwestern deserts to do as his forefathers had done and play with dirt. Along with a few other artists, Heizer invented the genre called “earth art” or “land art”. He creates sculptures from dirt, rocks (even boulders weighing hundreds of tons), sand and steel. Bulldozers, cranes, and heavy machinery are his tools of choice and the sun, wind, and air morph his work over time. The scale is gargantuan. City, a $25 million project that he's been working on for over 30 years, is more than a mile long and a quarter mile wide.
Featured Content
Here is what Wikipedia says about Michael Heizer
Michael Heizer (born 1944) is an American land artist specializing in large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Working largely outside the confines of the traditional art spaces of galleries and museums, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. A pioneer of 20th-century land art or Earthworks movement, he is widely recognized for sculptures and environmental structures made with earth-moving equipment, which he began creating in the American West in 1967. He currently lives and works in Hiko, Nevada, and New York City.
Check out the full Wikipedia article about Michael Heizer
