Applications for 2025 graduate certificate

Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University is seeking architects, artists, writers, historians, and others to participate in our graduate certificate program—a transdisciplinary field experience dedicated to expanding awareness of the intersection of human construction and the evolving nature of our planet. Land Arts leverages immersive field experience in the desert southwest as a prime pedagogic agent to support research that opens horizons of perception, probes depths of inquiry and advances understanding of human actions shaping environments. Land Arts attracts participants from across the university and beyond for a “semester abroad in our own backyard” traveling 6,000 miles overland while camping for two months to experience major land art monuments—Double Negative, Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, The Lightning Field—while also visiting sites to expand understanding of what land art might be, such as pre-contact archeology, military-industrial infrastructure, and sites of contemporary wilderness and waste. Throughout the travels, and on-campus, participants make work in response to their experience, which is exhibited at the Museum of Texas Tech University to conclude the field season.

Past participants have enrolled from across North America, Australia, Belgium, Chile, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom to study at Texas Tech during or after their work at the universities of Pennsylvania, Texas at Austin, Iowa, South Florida, California at Berkeley and Riverside, Carnegie Mellon, New York University, Goldsmith’s and the Royal College of Art  in London, Cranbrook, Rhode Island School of Design, Whitman College, Bard College, and Yale. 

To help negotiate the multivalent meaning of the places visited, and to shed light on strategies to aid their comprehension, the Land Arts program invites the wisdom of field guests—writers, artists, interpreters—to join specific portions of our journey. Past field guests have included Center for Land Use Interpretation director Matthew Coolidge, Utah Museum of Fine Arts director Gretchen Dietrich, Remote Studio director Lori Ryker, Adobe Alliance founder Simone Swan; artists Deborah Stratman, Dionne Lee, Joan Jonas, Postcommodity, and Zoe Leonard; art Historians Ann Reynolds, Kevin Chua, and Monty Paret; architects Urs Peter Flueckiger, David Gregor, Jack Sanders, and Nichole Wiedemann; and writers Curtis Bauer, Charles Bowden, Lucy Lippard, and Barry Lopez. 

Historically Land Arts participants carry lasting effects of their experience that resonates through their work and personal identity well beyond the duration of involvement with the certificate program. It is helpful to understand the labors and merits of Land Arts participation over longer periods of time than a semester or degree program. Such intense physical, intellectual, and emotional experiences make profound impressions that change people’s lives by transforming their relationships to the physical and social environments we occupy. 

Founded in 2000, Land Arts of the American West has been operating from the Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech University in Lubbock since 2009.

Register for an online information session here.

Encourage curious people.