Site-specific art
Art conceived for a particular place, with the location’s physical, social, or historical features integral to the work.
Installation art: Three-dimensional artworks arranged to transform or activate an exhibition space. Site-specific art often uses installation, but makes the chosen location essential.
Spiral Jetty: Robert Smithson’s 1970 earthwork, a spiral of rock and earth extending into Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Its form, materials, and changing visibility depend on the lake’s geology and water level.
Minimalism: An art movement that used simplified forms and industrial materials to foreground objects and their surroundings. Minimalist sculpture made the viewer’s bodily encounter with the gallery space newly significant.
Portable art: Artworks designed to be moved or displayed in different locations without losing their identity. Its portability reverses site-specific art’s dependence on a particular place.
Land art: Art made in or from landscapes, often using earth and natural materials. This movement includes works whose remote landscapes are inseparable from their form.
Tilted Arc: Richard Serra’s steel sculpture installed in New York’s Federal Plaza from 1981 to 1989. Its removal after public controversy made the work’s dependence on its location explicit.
Robert Smithson: An American artist and writer associated with land art and the concept of entropy. His writings and earthworks helped establish place as a material of artistic practice.
Museum: An institution that collects, preserves, studies, and exhibits objects of cultural or scientific significance. Museum display can detach an artwork from the place that originally gave it meaning.
Public art: Art created for public spaces or public audiences, often outside conventional galleries. Site-specific works in shared spaces must engage the conditions of public access.
The Gates: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 installation of saffron fabric panels across paths in Central Park. The temporary work was designed for the park’s paths, landscape, and winter setting.