1. “The sum of the facts does not constitute the work or determine its esthetics.” —Walter De Maria1
The drive from Albuquerque to Quemado was long, winding through sandstone bluffs and three-thousand-year-old lava flows. It was June 2021 and my partner and I were here to finally see what is regarded as a canonical work of the land art movement. Eventually, we arrived at a nondescript building identifiable only by the white vinyl lettering on its window, a recognizable code for contemporary art. Inside, we met Kim, a representative for the Dia Art Foundation, who welcomed us into a pickup truck for the remaining forty-five-minute drive to The Lightning Field. As we rumbled our way down dirt roads towards the artwork, Kim pointed out the subdivisions that have been rapidly springing up in the area over recent years. Punctuating the desert, the homes floated alongside a small, shabby real estate office. “You can already see three roofs from The Lightning Field in the mornings,” Kim added with a hint of regret. As a longtime resident of the area, her discomfort surrounding these developments was personal as well as professional; the subdivisions disrupted the landscape, the local community, and the artist’s stated intention for the work.
Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) takes the form of four hundred stainless steel poles installed in a precise one-mile-by-one-kilometer rectangular grid. The piece was commissioned and is still stewarded by Dia and sits on a large swath of remote land in the western New Mexico high desert, the coordinates of which Dia does not publicly disclose. By setting the work within this landscape rather than in a museum or gallery, De Maria, like other land artists of the 1960s and ’70s, aimed to move beyond institutional confines, to expand the perceptual qualities of art to landscape scale. Land is part and parcel of this work, he insisted, and so according to his stipulations, no houses or other human-made structures should be visible from the site. De Maria selected this place, this particular parcel, for its lack of architecture, and any new real estate poses a threat to the work’s faithful realization. Here, the conservation of land and art have been yoked together.
The intertwining of cultural and environmental protections yields curious effects. For example, in an effort to mitigate continuing land-use changes, in order to shore up The Lightning Field experience as an unchanging and perpetual space of isolation, Dia has been buying up land adjacent to the work with financial support from its Board of Trustees, the State of New Mexico, one of De Maria’s assistants, and luxury fashion brand Gucci.2 Though this type of public-philanthropic-corporate partnership for conserving art is not particularly uncommon, other efforts by Dia to maintain this site are.
What I learned on my trip catalyzed archival research, through which I made a bizarre finding: the conservation of The Lightning Field has itself become artwork, enacted through the novel deployment of a legal agreement known as a conservation easement.3 The Lightning Field, as I came to see it, is not only a well-known work of land art beholden to the masculinist traditions of monumental intervention in the landscape. It is also a surprising potential model for subversive land use practices in the US. In an unforeseen twist, De Maria’s isolationist fantasy of land serving as large-scale scenery for an artwork may now offer hope for bringing the land’s conservation to the fore. Beyond a useful case study for how land art has weathered the decades since its construction, the artwork’s contradictions and the diverse parties invested in its maintenance suggest inroads for experiments in conservation.
2. “The Lightning Field is a permanent work”
As we passed one cattle ranch after another, I noticed the sparseness of cows, as though they, like De Maria, preferred empty space. We gently nudged a big black bull out of the road with the nose of the truck and finally arrived at the restored homesteading cabin adjacent to the artwork, a structure as integral to The Lightning Field as its poles. Another of De Maria’s directives, still enforced by Dia, is that any viewer who visits the work must experience it over roughly twenty-four hours in order to observe the effects of differing daylight and weather conditions on the rods. To make his wishes possible, a Dia staff member has shepherded guests to and from the cabin on select visitation days since the work was made public. And while typically the space hosts six visitors per night—limited spots that book up almost instantaneously each year—my visit came at a pandemic-inflected time in which accommodations were made only for discrete groups. My partner and I were to be the sole occupants of the cabin and the only visitors to the artwork that day, making for a less communal but more intimate encounter with this place, seemingly even more in line with De Maria’s ideals of viewer isolation.
I got a glimpse of the poles glimmering behind the old wood cabin as we approached, but the smaller wooden structures at the front of the property distracted me, one large enough to be mistaken for a livable hut. Kim said she likes to joke that it’s a “two-person outhouse,” but it actually hides some electrical infrastructure that “Walter didn’t want showing.” Later, I noticed a rustic wood cabinet camouflaging an electrical box. De Maria approached The Lightning Field’s surroundings as a controlled set, a space where he could maintain the illusion of an organic background to his metallic technological marvel, creating a stark contrast between the work and its context. His interventions were intended to keep the peripheral details static and “permanent,” such that his artwork became the only changing, durational variable.
Land is never static, never under control. It is always tied to pasts and futures and bound up in webs of relation. This specific land between Quemado and Pie Town, for instance, has been home to at least four Indigenous nations, including the Diné Bikéyah, Chiricahua Apache, Pueblos, and Shiwinna (Zuni) peoples.4 The cabin was built in the early twentieth century by homesteaders laying claim to the land in service of the colonial state; they labored in harsh conditions in exchange for forty acres’ worth of isolation.5 And environmental conditions have only become harsher in a time of accelerating change, with the effects of settler presence on this landscape becoming more apparent. New Mexico’s climate, like every place else, is mutating. With it, land art across the continent has begun to mutate too. The Holt/Smithson foundation, which maintains works by prominent land artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, has observed that rising temperatures are drying up the region of the Great Salt Lake in which Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) is sited.6 Climate change will eventually affect The Lightning Field in observable ways as well, as wildfires and occasional flooding are predicted to increase in the region, likely making the artwork more difficult to visit and maintain.7 But in tandem with a changing climate, the ways that land is managed and organized—through gentrification, the financialization of real estate, and state bureaucracy—is challenging settler notions of its fixity and seclusion.
3. “The land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work”
Conservation easements are legal agreements between landowners and qualified agencies (usually governments or land trusts) in which landowners agree to limit the use of land in order to protect it. Landowners maintain most, but not all, of their private property rights and do so in exchange for tax benefits and other financial incentives. Each conservation easement is tailored to the property and its owner but the owner typically foregoes rights like subdivision, the construction of new housing structures, and logging. In recent years, the federal government, state governments, land trusts, and landowners seeking tax breaks have become unlikely bedfellows in their increased support of and use of easements. Some states have implemented “30 by 30” goals, promising to protect 30 percent of lands and waters by 2030, which has accelerated easement uptake as a tactic for expanding protected acreage.
Easements have long been popular—and contested—conservation tools, often used as financial instruments with limited, if any, environmental gain. For years, they were the “most generous charitable deduction in the federal tax code.”8 They have been used as major tax loopholes by the wealthy, for example by Donald Trump, who has claimed millions in tax deductions through easements on some of his golf courses.9 In 2023, Joe Biden was able to mitigate some of these cheat codes by limiting the possible gains for “syndicated easements,” a scheme in which conservation easement stakes are sold off to investors to turn a quick profit. It is unclear how these instruments will be leveraged further in politically volatile times.10 Though conservationists are somewhat divided in their positions on easements, some advocate for easements as a better-than-nothing approach to keeping construction and destruction in check.
4. “A permanent caretaker and administrator will reside near the location for continuous maintenance, protection and assistance”
As we made our way inside, Kim detailed the dinner she left for us in the kitchen. She then offered us suggestions for how to approach the artwork—walking around the perimeter first, then weaving between the poles—before she headed back to Quemado and left us to explore. I soon found books of laminated literature scattered around the cabin for guests, full of cabin instructions and documentation of the piece and its construction. These included the manifesto-like artist statement that De Maria wrote about The Lightning Field, published in Artforum three years after its completion. In it, De Maria makes scant mention of the origins of the work’s land or its cabin. Though he describes in exacting detail how the piece was planned and executed, the only note about the cabin reads dryly: “The original log cabin located 200 yards beyond the mid-point of the northern most row has been restored to accommodate visitors’ needs.”11 He didn’t deem the homesteading history of the cabin, or any other aspects of the history of the area, relevant to interpretation of the work; in fact, his goal was to detach the work from history as completely as possible.
By now, it seems clear that this space, where contextual details deemed superfluous have been plastered over or encased in wooden boxes, where laminated didactics abound, and where a docent suggests the right modes of experiencing the art, is not so far from the museum and gallery institutions that De Maria claimed to reject. This was not the rejection of the white cube; it was land made white cube.
That the deinstitutionalization of art was a bit of a scam all along is not necessarily surprising, given the broader context of De Maria’s practice and that of his contemporaries. Works of land art, sometimes called “Earthworks,” were often still presented in traditional gallery or museum spaces via photographic documentation, drawings, and other evidence of their construction. They were not separate from the gallery system but in fact largely propped up by it, most notably by art dealer Virginia Dwan, who provided milieu, money, and legitimacy. Dwan sponsored De Maria’s first iteration of The Lightning Field, financed Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, and purchased the land for Double Negative, another celebrated land artwork in Nevada by artist Michael Heizer.12 Dwan supported De Maria’s interest in land as fixed material, a gallery in which to set his pointed intervention.
5. “The primary experience takes place within The Lightning Field”
To maintain the artwork in perpetuity, Dia too has been working to stabilize the dynamics of land. A few details of its landholdings around The Lightning Field have been made public. For example, Dia “secured 9000 acres of land south and west of the sculpture” in 2008 and 2009, a caching of territory they describe as “a means of preserving the isolated experience that is essential to the work for future generations of visitors.”13 But Dia has not publicized its establishment of conservation easements surrounding the work and has mostly kept its relationship to the land private.14
Having encountered a passing mention of a conservation easement in the research I conducted following my visit, I wrote to the foundation three times to inquire about it. I eventually received a curt message stating they could not share this information with me, in keeping with the artists’ wishes. I pressed: Could they clarify what De Maria’s specific request had been that prevented them from sharing easement details? If the primary concern was about revealing the artwork’s location, I’d be happy to look at location-redacted documents. I wrote, “Again, I believe the easements themselves should be in the public record.” Dia responded: “De Maria … expressed that he did not wish to disclose conservator or fabrication information as this might mitigate a visitor’s experience with the work.”15 I found this confounding; De Maria wrote extensively about the nitty gritty of the piece’s development. Now fixated, I kept digging.
6. “Part of the content of the work is the ratio of people to the space, a small number of people to a large amount of space”
There was a lot of shit out in the Field, literal shit from at least three animals: cows, prairie dogs, and elk or antelope. There was shit all over one of the exterior walls of the cabin too, from birds who must have at some point built a nest there. There were two dead mice to the left of the cabin’s entrance, not visibly wounded but likely killed by rodenticide. Later, I noticed that one of the laminated informational sheets in the kitchen mentioned that guests should ensure food is closed at night to keep mice out.
Cow shit, in particular, was everywhere, seemingly from animals who wandered in from nearby ranches. As an agricultural artifact, it was perhaps as prominent a human-inflected intervention on the land as were the rods, if more arbitrarily placed. But many beings have cultivated longer relationships to this site. Among them I saw rabbits, lizards, beetles, birds, and sparse scrub brush. A hummingbird made a brief visit and the primary sound was of buzzing flies, countless flies spiraling around my head from the moment of arrival, somewhat distracting me from the wind and other sounds of nature “out there.” The scale of the work suggested that I should be gazing at the big open plains and mountains in the distance, the panorama, the “landscape” stripped of all its particulars, rather than focused close-up on flies and rodents. I was supposed to feel like the only being there—and to feel small amid the monumental work. De Maria’s Artforum essay closes with an italicized claim: “Isolation is the essence of Land Art.” But what is land devoid of other life? How does one reconcile that fantasy with a landscape that is perpetually buzzing? The house was outfitted with many fly swatters.
7. “It took five months to complete both the aerial and the land surveys”
Repeated phone calls to the assessor and clerk’s offices in Catron County, where The Lightning Field is situated, yielded no results about the easement, though a deep dive into their database and into that of the adjacent Cibola County revealed more information about Dia’s landholdings in general. In total, the foundation appears to own at least eighteen thousand acres of land including and surrounding The Lightning Field, amounting to a little over twenty-eight square miles.
“There are no publicly available conservation easement agreements,” said the Catron County clerk’s office. Did this mean that the easements are not public? Or that they don’t exist? I took to looser forms of searching and surfaced a first clue, an online clip of a sensationalized local news segment from 2012 that mentioned one easement held by Dia, referred to as the “Quemado Basin Conservation Easement.” According to the segment, Dia secured the easement by paying a $500,000 financial incentive to a rancher owning the cattle range adjacent to the artwork, in exchange for his agreement not to develop the land.16 Rife with clip-art animations and sound effects, the news segment offered a critical take, as the easement was apparently paid for by state taxpayer dollars. Dia had asked the state of New Mexico to fund the project because, according to the snarky news anchor, “It simply would not do to have a Super Walmart or a bunch of condos spoil the background.” That easement, for 5,440 acres (8.5 square miles), was secured by Dia in 2008, and its legal documentation is housed in an unexpected place, the New Mexico Museum of Art’s Collections.17
8. “During the mid-portion of the day 70 to 90 percent of the poles become virtually invisible due to the high angle of the sun”
The poles were almost imperceptible from some viewpoints in the afternoon light. Over the course of only a few hours since our arrival, they lost their steely dimensionality and had become ephemeral. Phenomenal changes like this are at the core of The Lightning Field’s concept: its appearance constantly shifts based on light and weather patterns. But because De Maria conceived of land as a static backdrop for the changing artwork, he treated the choice of site itself as somewhat interchangeable. In Artforum, he detailed his land surveys of five states—California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Texas—before settling on New Mexico. He described a prototype of the work he made in Arizona, a smaller-scale but nonetheless massive installation featuring “35 stainless steel poles with pointed tips, each 18 feet tall and 200 feet apart.”18 De Maria’s writing is full of these cold hard facts about metal, with few specificities of soil and species.
The Nevada location that De Maria considered for the final work particularly appealed to him; it appeared suitably barren because it had been used as a nuclear testing site. As writer Alicia Inez Guzmán explains in her analysis of The Lightning Field, “blasts cleared the desert of vegetation and all potential life, engineering [it] into the image of its cultural projection as blank.”19 Dominant powers of the American West have long treated soil, specifically desert soil, as inert and unchanging, ahistorical and abiotic, even though deserts are thriving ecosystems unless they are laid waste by people. Though the myth of an empty desert was foundational for colonialist expansion, it takes a lot of intervention to create a denuded landscape.
As evening came, The Lightning Field’s poles transformed dramatically. Suddenly they were gleaming pointed tips, then gleaming rods, then a cascade of reflected orange light. Darkness revealed shooting stars and other illuminations that drew my attention. Two or three airplanes flew overhead and a pair of towers in the far distance became visible by their flashing red lights. To the east, I glimpsed a patch of glowing sky, presumably light pollution from Albuquerque. I noticed that cellular reception was weak but present, yet I yielded to the illusion of seclusion and pretended it didn’t exist.
Despite these new structures, signals, and waves that figure into the work’s ongoingness, De Maria had clear intentions to conceal the infrastructure around the cabin to maintain the conceit of a landscape suspended in time. Nonetheless, he embraced technology at every step in the project’s construction. His essay reads like a humblebrag about the land surveys, engineering studies, and computer analysis necessary for completing the work. The whole text, subtitled “Some Facts, Notes, Data, Information, Statistics and Statements,” endeavors to legitimize the artwork via the technological apparatus of its making.
9. “No photograph, group of photographs or other recorded images can completely represent The Lightning Field”
It is unusual to see an artwork centered within a conservation easement. It is more unusual still to see a conservation easement housed within a museum’s collection—an astonishing point of contact between the conservation of art and of the environment. There’s also something strangely recursive about a museum-resisting artwork that begat an easement, which now itself sits in a museum.
When I reached out to the head of Registration and Collections at the New Mexico Museum of Art to ask whether the easement document had been accessioned as an artwork, she responded that “the easement is accessioned into the permanent collection, not the paperwork. The paperwork exists in the object files to document the accessioned work and how we acquired it.”20 She seemed to be suggesting that the tool of conservation itself—the relinquishing of landowner rights for the sake of environmental protection—was now treated as an artwork. The Lightning Field, the construction of which was made possible by previous land management strategies, continues to exist due to new land management strategies, which themselves have, apparently, been made art.
10. “A simple walk around the perimeter of the poles takes approximately two hours”
The next morning, I woke up before the sunrise to view the rods’ most radiant transition, following another piece of advice from Kim. Transforming from a brushed-metallic pink in the first rays of light, the poles turned sparkling white as the sun made its ascent. It was remarkably quiet except for a few birds chirping in the distance, and I searched for the three alleged roofs but couldn’t spot them. I spent most of the morning walking the entire Field, circumnavigating then zigzagging across it. As I approached the cabin to pack up, Robert, the work’s primary caretaker, who lives next door in a house just out of sight, turned the corner to drive us back to Quemado, responsibilities he shares with Kim. He was a striking presence—silver hair, silver belt buckle, and a cowboy hat, with sun-crinkled skin that made his age difficult to pin down.
We packed up the truck and headed down the gravel road. Robert spoke softly and kindly as he patiently answered my questions. Originally from Pie Town, he was working on a nearby ranch when De Maria hired him at the start of the project. At the time, he was a “cow boy,” which he said with a noticeable gap between syllables so as to make me rethink the word altogether—not some glamorous and rugged picture of masculinity but a role with a degree of immaturity. He had worked extensively throughout the construction phase, developing a friendship with De Maria while he was on site, and became the work’s caretaker in 1979. Since then, he has helped to maintain the artwork and cabin, and led a major conservation project of the work in 2013 after years of rough weather took their toll. I told him I believed he should receive more credit for all of his labor on the work, to which he sheepishly smiled.
I asked Robert why the cows are so sparse in the ranches of this region, as I was familiar with denser herds in the high desert of Colorado. He said that the harsh conditions necessitate seventy acres per cow (an acre is about the size of a US football field). Like Kim, he told me how land is being snapped up in the area, mostly by wealthy people looking to get away from big cities and who are “unprepared for the lifestyle” (the nearest hospital is two hours away). An adjacent lot, meanwhile, is now owned by a “big corporation”; the lot is divided up into some one thousand sections, each 640 acres. Dia, he informed me, has also been gobbling up sections for the sake of the artwork. Under current US conditions, landscape is as much a commodity as it is a habitat. The use and ownership of land surrounding this work of land art is still very much being negotiated.
As we made our way back to Dia’s office in Quemado, I asked Robert, “What would Dia do without you?” He laughed, “They’re going to find out soon enough!” The hardest part of his job, he said, is living in isolation, and he suggested it would be challenging for Dia to find another person willing to take his place. Isolation as an aestheticized tourist experience of land is quite different from the lived reality of maintaining an isolated place, especially when that place is already inhabited.
11. “The invisible is real”
Since my visit, it seems that Robert has indeed been moving towards retirement: in April 2025, Dia posted a job ad for an Assistant Caretaker. In addition to tending to visitors and performing general maintenance of the artwork, cabin, and property, including “residential plumbing, septic systems, electric and wiring, … extensive walking, digging trenches over multiple miles, [and] pouring concrete,” the job description lists as a requirement the “understanding of and commitment to the artist’s intentions for the presentation of The Lightning Field to the public.” The primary duty of the position is described as fulfilling the “conservation needs of the artwork and its parts.”21
Though De Maria’s version of land art mostly consisted of large-scale interventions that didn’t account for pasts or futures, human or nonhuman cycles, his stubborn insistence on the work’s permanent protection and static sightlines has brought about an unanticipated result. It is remarkable that the illusion of The Lightning Field’s stasis is what has allowed it to be turned into an instrument of conservation—what may become the environmentally contributive part of its legacy. Here is a work of land art, a genre best known for its masculinist imposition if not downright violence, that has cultivated an unintentionally beneficial relationship to land by preserving it from luxury housing development and exploitation.
This could point a way towards subversive potentials for environmental art to come—material interventions that do not rely on bulldozers or steel but that seek out loopholes in capitalist systems to build something perhaps less monumental but even more transformative. These potentials are in line with contemporary strands of environmental art that aim to have a direct impact on property ownership and stewardship, such as those calling for rematriation. Examples include the transfer of land and architecture from Portland’s Yale Union to the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation in 2020, and the artist-led return of an Indigenous mound in St. Louis to the Osage Nation in 2025.22
Conservation easements remain deeply imperfect tools, and engagement with conservation should always raise “who” and “what for” questions. Who gets to make decisions about what is conserved and how? Who is the land envisioned as being conserved for? Conservation has its roots in the framing of land as resource, a material that must be managed for future (human) use. That use could be timber, water, or minerals; here, it is unobstructed views from De Maria’s artwork. As anti-colonial scholar Max Liboiron reminds us, resource-thinking around land often means that the land ends up conserved for some imagined dominant future (one whose protagonist is human, white, settler, or otherwise power-laden). It produces land that is “colonized in advance,” on which “other relations, activities, or futures” are foreclosed.23 In this sense, conserving the land surrounding The Lightning Field for the artwork’s sake could also be read as precluding other forms of land use, such as home- or ranch-building for locals, land-back efforts, solar farm construction, or the designation of public lands. Conservation always implies a set of priorities, and proceeds according to specific interests.
The Lightning Field welcomes 1,100 guests a year at a current entry price of up to $300 per visitor—surely not a profit model for Dia yet still unaffordable for many. Visiting the remote site requires significant time and effort to experience an immersive artwork and to live-action-role-play wilderness isolation. And the remaining unprotected land around the field is still being grabbed—by retirees, by corporations, by art foundations. What could a more critical conservation, of land art and otherwise, look like, one that is engaged with local communities and their needs? A stipulation of the Quemado Basin Conservation Easement is, for example, that there be no public access on the adjacent rancher’s land in perpetuity—no opportunities for viewing the artwork in ways outside of what De Maria intended (or for free).24 But land art and its conservation could instead be refigured towards more expansive land relations, ones that resist top-down approaches and champion local knowledges, that do not prioritize human interests over multispecies ones, and perhaps most significantly, that challenge, rather than conform to, unsustainable capitalist systems, which are the primary drivers of environmental collapse to begin with. These strategies could work to align a multiplicity of interests and to rethink art’s role in environmental stewardship. They could be applied to art-historical Earthworks, adapting the conservation of existing sites to the world that has changed around them, or be mobilized by new land-based artworks of today, devising methods of critical conservation from the ground up. Land art could be rooted in a notion of land that is active, relational, intergenerational, and always in flux—of “land [as] a verb.”25
Walter De Maria, “The Lightning Field,” Artforum 18, no. 8 (April 1980). All section headings in this essay are drawn from this text.
Dia Art Foundation, “Funding,” Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field (blog) →.
Gucci, “Partnership History,” Gucci and Dia Art Foundation (blog) →.
As indicated on Native-Lands.ca. Not verified with each Indigenous nation.
For more on the history of land as property in relation to this work, I recommend an essay by K-Sue Park that also links the practice of surveying land for settlement to The Lightning Field’s mapping of a grid onto the landscape: Park, “The Lightning Field, the Border, and Real Estate,” X-Tra 21, no. 3 (Spring 2019) →.
“Changing Climate at Spiral Jetty,” Holt/Smithson Foundation →.
Nelia W Dunbar et al., “Climate Change and New Mexico’s Water Resources: A 50-Year Outlook,” New Mexico Earth Matters, 2022.
Peter Elkind, “The Billion-Dollar Loophole,” ProPublica, December 20, 2017 →.
Elkind, “The Billion-Dollar Loophole.”
Dominic Parker, “Congress Limits Conservation Easement Writeoffs—That’s Good for Conservation and Taxpayers,” Property and Environment Research Center, January 13, 2023 →.
De Maria, “Lightning Field.”
Sarah Cascone, “Virginia Dwan, Pioneering Dealer Who Bankrolled Some of Land Art’s Most Daring Masterpieces, Has Died at 90,” Artnet, September 9, 2022 →.
Dia Art Foundation, “Miuccia Prada and Larry Gagosian Make Leadership Gift to Support Preservation of Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field,” press release →.
Another rare public comment about the work’s maintenance came when the work was restored in 2013 with support from prominent gallerist Larry Gagosian and fashion designer Miuccia Prada. Unintentionally invoking Indigenous dispossession around the work, Gagosian said of his contribution to the restoration that “The Lightning Field is like Mount Rushmore for a new generation.” Dia Art Foundation, “Miuccia Prada and Larry Gagosian.”
Email correspondence with Dia Curatorial (curatorial@diaart.org) on July 17, 18, and 29, 2024.
“KRQE Lightning Field,” posted April 19, 2012 by KRQE, YouTube video →.
“Conservation Easement,” in collections at the New Mexico Museum of Art, June 17, 2008.
De Maria, “Lightning Field.”
Alicia Inez Guzmán, “Connected in Isolation: Land and Landscape in New Mexico and the Greater Southwest” (PhD dissertation, University of Rochester, 2016), 165.
Email correspondence with Ruth LaNore, head of Registration and Collections at the New Mexico Museum of Art, July 3, 2024. Emphasis added.
“Assistant Caretaker” job posting, Dia Art Foundation website, April 2025.
Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021), 65.
“Conservation Easement.”
Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism, 42.
