OBERLIN, OH.- Through June 23, an exhibition at the Allen Memorial Art Museum explores the expansive legacy of the Land art movement that emerged in the 1960s in revolt against white-walled museums and galleries as the primary places to encounter art. “The Body is the Map: Approaches to Land in the Americas After 1960” presents more than 40 works from the Allen’s collection.

Beginning in the 1960s, artists such as Christo, Mary Miss, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson journeyed outside of New York to create monumental works out in the land, frequently using earth itself as a sculptural material. “Moving art outdoors challenged the materiality, spatiality, and temporality of art as most understood it at the time,” says Andrea Gyorody, the museum’s Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, who organized the show with assistance from Oberlin College student Amy Baylis.

Land art (also called Earth art or Earthworks) was as historically grounded as it was forward facing. Nearly all of these artists referenced art produced by ancient and indigenous cultures in their work. “They were influenced as much by Native American burial mounds, Aztec tombs, and imperialist notions of the West as they were by spectacular images of the moon landing and of the Earth seen from outer space for the first time,” Gyorody says.

The presence of the human body is often evoked in early Land art, either directly or implicitly. For example, an installation by Smithson consisting of a large mirror propped against the wall with a pile of salt reflects the space of the gallery around it as well as the visitors who pass in front of it. As more artists across the Americas have taken up the environment as a theme or material, the human body has only become more central. Alfredo Jaar, Chris Jordan, Ana Mendieta, and Mercedes Dorame, among others featured in the Allen’s exhibition, consider anew how the human body and everything it carries—gender, race, class, culture, ethnicity—intersect with the environments we inhabit and traverse.

The works in this exhibition speak in vastly different ways about the relationships between body and land, employing aesthetic languages that range from Minimalism and assemblage to landscape photography and video. What these works share is an “expansive view of history,” Gyorody says, “and an optimism about the role of art in navigating our increasingly interconnected, politically fraught, and environmentally endangered world.”