For most of her life, Teresita Fernández had encountered in person as many artworks by Land Art trailblazer Robert Smithson as most people had—which is to say, zero.
“For most of us, the little we know of Robert Smithson is that bad picture in art-history books of Spiral Jetty, which is really little and in grainy black and white,” says the Brooklyn-based artist of Smithson’s seminal site-specific 1970 earthwork in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which came to epitomize Land Art. “We don’t know how the artwork was made. We don’t know what it looks like from any other angle. And that was my experience too. It wasn’t until I was much older that I saw a piece of his.”
That’s in part because Smithson’s most important works are site-specific earthworks, designed to be consumed by time and nature, in places far from art-world hubs, such as Kent, Ohio, and the northeastern Netherlands—and because his life was cut short at age 35 by a light-aircraft crash while inspecting a site for another piece in 1973.
Now, as co-curator of a groundbreaking exhibition that brings his historic work in dialogue with hers, Fernández has seen more of his work than ever before—and so too can visitors to “Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson,” on view at Site Santa Fe through October 28.
Conceived as an intergenerational conversation between two artists, the show considers themes of place, site, and agency. Along with co-curator Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation (dedicated to the legacies of Smithson and fellow Land Art artist Nancy Holt, his wife), Fernández not only surfaces formal, material, and conceptual resonances but also, at times, challenges Smithson’s work and complicates his legacy.
It makes for a provocative, spirited show, which marks the first time Smithson’s work has been in direct conversation with a living artist‘s. The exhibition encompasses more than 30 works by Fernández from the past three decades—including sculptures, site-responsive installations, films, and drawings—alongside a similar number of pieces Smithson made between 1961 and 1972 that consider the impact of humanity on Earth’s surface.
A 2005 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient, Fernández frequently delves into the idea of landscape, broadly defined, in her practice. New Yorkers may be familiar with her stainless-steel site-specific work clinging to the Brooklyn Academy of Music sculpture terrace, permanently displayed there since 2021, or her canopy of shimmering golden disks that covered Madison Square Park’s pathways in 2015.
“My work is about place and landscape, but it’s also about what we don’t see when we look at the landscape and what’s been erased,” she explains. “What happened there? Who lived there? What are the invisible histories? I’m not just looking at the physical matter of the place but also the sometimes erased colonial histories that we have to dig deeper to find.”
Fernández began by going through Smithson’s archives at the Santa Fe–based foundation, looking at thousands of pieces that had never been on public view (many of which are part of the exhibition). “We’ve had a very narrow view of Smithson—it’s really just a couple of pieces and then Spiral Jetty,” Fernández says. Surveying the breadth of his work allowed her to see him in a new way, and she hopes the show provides a more complete picture of Smithson as an artist.
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Fernández first studied Smithson as a student in the early 1990s. “Smithson’s an alluring guy,” she admits. “He’s an expansive thinker, and his writings are timeless. Any artist of my generation would’ve been influenced by that.”
But one aspect of Smithson’s writings particularly appealed to Fernández: “Nothing was off limits. He was interested in many different things, and they didn’t have to make sense together.” She was compelled by “the strangeness of how he looked at the world around him in a very subjective way that allowed for building a practice that could be about anything. I feel like my practice is like that, so that was very inspiring.”
Smithson’s concepts of Sites (actual physical locations) and Nonsites (earthworks intended for indoor display that were references to Sites) were especially influential on Fernández, as they were for generations of artists. The exhibition opens on a note of agreement, with Smithson’s A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey) (1968)—trapezoidal bins filled with limestone from a New Jersey mine—alongside Fernández’s Viñales (Reclining Nude) (2015), featuring pieces of malachite from the Democratic Republic of Congo cascading down trapezoidal pedestals.
Instead of the polarities of Site and Nonsite, Fernández has developed a theory of what she calls “stacked landscapes,” where any one place can contain many places simultaneously. “It’s a much more vertical sense of site because things are hidden,” she explains. “The more you peel back the layers, the more ways you’ll understand that a place is actually many places in time at once.”
Passing through the exhibition rooms, the discourse between the two artists builds from polite contestations to louder disputes. They come to a head in the gallery with Smithson’s Hotel Palenque, a rambling and sometimes wry lecture and slideshow the artist presented in 1972 about his trip to the Yucatán Peninsula. He intended it as a critique on colonialist travelogues and guidebook tourism by Americans and Canadians in Mexico, but to modern eyes, “this work is so difficult, so problematic,” Le Feuvre says, because “Smithson replicates that very language he sought to critique.”
A transcript is provided in the gallery for reference, as Fernández notes most visitors tend not to sit through the entire 43-minute work. Smithson says in one slide: “There is something about Mexico…an overall hidden concealed violence about the landscape itself.… You have to be very careful when you go to Mexico so that you are not caught up in any of this unconscious, dangerous violence that really is lurking in every patch of earth. It’s just air, everywhere ready to get you, so you have to be on your guard at all times.”
“I think it’s generous to say that Smithson was thinking about how North Americans are,” Fernandez counters. “He was one too—he was a tourist, exoticizing the things he was looking at. He talks about how violent Mexicans are and the cruelty of their gods, slicing up babies and old men as sacrifices to grow corn. There is such massive misinterpretation and racism projected on the place he’s looking at.”
She accepts that the debate is somewhat lopsided—Smithson isn’t alive to respond, after all, not to mention he made these works as a young man (and, at 56, Fernández has now worked as an artist for as long as Smithson was alive). But these are indeed his words, his voice, she points out—and to her, it’s an incredibly emotional room. “It’s hard to listen to that rhetoric today about the danger of Mexicans and how violent they are—the kind of hateful rhetoric that’s so familiar in the United States and has been for centuries.” She spent four days in that gallery creating Charred Landscape (America) (2017), a large site-specific charcoal drawing of a landscape in flames that slices through Smithson’s projection.
Ultimately Fernández took pains to showcase Smithson’s many facets. “In my own practice I believe in making experiences that are about both the political and the poetic,” she notes. Likewise, near Hotel Palenque sits Smithson’s Mirrors and Shelly Sand (1969–70), a nearly 30-foot-long work of sand on the gallery floor segmented with mirrors, which Fernández calls “stunning and beautiful.” “Smithson’s work can be so deeply poetic,” she recognizes. “Real beauty is positioned side by side with ugly, controversial language. Sitting within those contradictions is part of the exhibition.”
Thus the viewer doesn’t escape implication in Fernández’s works, either. In the Hotel Palenque room, for instance, when one watches Smithson’s projection, Fernández’s burning landscape “watches you watching the projection,” she notes. “I don’t think of the landscape as passive, ever. If you look at the landscape, the landscape looks back at you.”
